Kowalski, Philip J. (Author)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thrailkill, Jane F
Edition Details: Advisor: Thrailkill, Jane F.
Physical Details: 236 pp.
Language: English
Cultural Genetics provides a new way of conceiving the separate spheres debate in nineteenth-century American literature that has traditionally opposed the natural to the cultural, the home to the marketplace, and sentimentalism to naturalism. In this project, I situate the writings of major American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, within what I theorize as the convergence of biological and cultural discourses in order to reframe classic arguments about sentimentalism as typified by Ann Douglas and Glenn Hendler. I employ the conceptual framework of what I term "reconstructed corporeality" in contemporary American culture to identify and locate the overlapping spheres of nature and nurture at play in domestic environments throughout the nineteenth century. Physically invasive practices such as plastic surgery, gastric bypass, and liposuction, as well as technological supplements such as titanium limbs and microchip insertions, presume that human bodies in their natural state are always susceptible to cultural interventions that regulate bodies while aesthetically altering them. These practices and perceptions that influence the way we think about human physicality are most notably codified by the post-modern feminist, Donna Haraway, but I argue that this manipulation of human development actually begins much earlier with Lamarckian theories of inheritance in antebellum America. Most readily equated with the inheritance of acquired characters, Lamarckism supplies a model that illuminates how nineteenth-century writers conceptualized human development. By privileging the trope of a Lamarckian human cultivation over Darwinian natural selection that dominates the later nineteenth-century, this project illustrates how biological and environmental determinism can necessarily be brought under human control.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/11 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3289062.
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