Brief Selected Bibliography for English 573, Scientific Americans
We'll continue to update this list as the semester progresses.
Primary Sources | Contemporary Readings | Secondary Sources |
Medicine, Sexuality, and Health | ||
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner (1859) or A Mortal Antipathy S. Weir Mitchell,The Autobiography of a Quack Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite (first published in 2004) Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1926) Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1905) Henry Blake Fuller, Bertram Cope’s Year (1919) Gertrude Atherton, Black Oxen (1923) Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Doctor Zay Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor Lillie Devereux Blake, Fettered for Life (1874) Rebecca Harding Davis, Kitty's Choice: A Story of Berrytown (1873) |
Charles Beard, American Nervousness (1881) S. Weir Mitchell, “Fat and Blood, An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria” (1911); The Autobiography of a Quack Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (1905) Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1897) William James on habit (from Principles of Psychology) Bernarr Macfadden, Physical Culture magazine John Vansant, The Physiological Action of Magnetism (1870) |
Barbara Will, "Nervous Systems," Long, Lisa A. "'The Corporeity Of Heaven': Rehabilitating The Civil War Body In The Gates Ajar." American Literature 69.4 (1997): 781-811. Long, Lisa. Rehabilitating Bodies. Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic. Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903 (1993) Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (2000) Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2007) Jane Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (2007) T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1994) Cynthia Davis, Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American literature, 1845-1918 (2000) Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (1995) Treichler, Paula, and Lisa Cartwright, eds. Imaging Technologies, Inscribing Science De la Pena, Carolyn. The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (2003) Behling, Laura L. Gross Anatomies: Fictions Of The Physical In American Literature. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna UP, 2008. Browner, Profound Science and Elegant Literature |
Race, Ethnicity, and Identity | ||
Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases (1892) Angelina Weld Grimké, Rachel (1915) and “The Closing Door” Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance or Onoto Watanna, Me: A Book of Remembrance E. Jane Gay, With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889-1892 Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars W. D. Howells, An Imperative Duty Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man Nella Larsen, Quicksand, Passing |
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Franz Boaz, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) Josiah Strong, Our Country (1885) Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916) Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883) Franz Boas, Changes in Bodily form of Descendants of Immigrants Joseph Simms, Physiognomy Illustrated |
Susan L. Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915 (2008) (Has a chapter on Howells’s utopian fiction) Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (1994) (Ch. 3, “Reimagining Materiality after Romanticism: Science, Phenomenology, and Narrative”) Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995) Brad Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920 (2005). Todd Vogel, Rewriting White Boeckmann, Cathy. A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912
Henry Wonham, Playing the Races |
Technology and the Body | ||
Henry James, “In the Cage” (1898) / The Turn of the Screw Mark Twain, “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton” (1878); “Mental Telegraphy” Ella Cheever Thayer, Wired Love (1880) |
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (Atlantic, 1864) |
Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (2001) Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (2000) Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003) David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (1990) Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism Electricity and American Romanticism (2009) Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (2001) Chinn, Sarah E. Technology and the Logic of American Racism (2001) Price and Thurschwell, Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (2005) Jill Galvin, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (2010) Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual Age Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life Colligan, Colette, and Margaret Linley. Media, Technology, And Literature In The Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011. Auerbach, Jonathan. Male Call: Becoming Jack London, Auerbach, Jonathan. Body Shots |
Evolution, Eugenics, Crime, Addiction | ||
Theodore Dreiser, *The Hand of the Potter (1918) and/or An American Tragedy (1925) Jack London, Before Adam (1906-07), “The Red One,” The People of the Abyss, or John Barleycorn (1913); The Abysmal Brute (1913) Frank Norris, “A Case for Lombroso,” “Lauth,” "Fantasie Prinantiere," The Pit, Vandover and the Brute (1914) Edith Wharton, "Bunner Sisters," The House of Mirth, "The Blond Beast," "The Descent of Man" |
Henry H. Goddard The Kallikak Family (1912) Richard L. Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity (1877) Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871) Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (1878) Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892) D. G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics (1891) |
Bert Bender, The Descent of Love and Evolution and “the Sex Problem”: American Narratives During the Eclipse of Darwinism (2004) Susan Zieger, Inventing the Addict (2008) James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in the Gilded Age (2010) |
Social Experiments: Utopian Freedom and Industrial Regimentation | ||
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1887) W. D. Howells, A Traveller from Altruria (1892-3) Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland and Women and Economics or What Diantha Did or The Crux Elia Peattie, “The Fountain of Youth” (1894-95) Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio Mary Austin, A Woman of Genius (1912) Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House |
Frederic Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management (1911) Charles Nordhoff, Communistic Societies of the United States (1877) |
Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (1995) Claeys, Gregory (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP; 2010 Mizruchi (on Howells) Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies |