ALI books

• Salazar, James Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America
  
  (available from NYU Press, Spring 2010).
  
  Bodies of Reform: the Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America offers a new perspective on character, one of the most coveted objects of nineteenth-century American culture. Character was a defining concept in nineteenth-century American culture, but has yet to emerge fully as a critical concept in American cultural studies. Conceived at the intersections of literature and politics, character was an idea that connected seemingly disparate zones of economic, political, and cultural activity in the nineteenth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in relation to a diverse collection of texts concerned with character-building, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, police gazettes, libel and naturalization law, benevolent society publications, psychology textbooks, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, Salazar uncovers a unique archive in which the cultural practices of reading and representing character can be seen to operate in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers.