Philippa Chun (Author)
Samuels, Shirley (Advisor)
Cornell University
Samuels, Shirley
Physical Details: 146
Language: English
The chapters of this dissertation examine scenes of death and dissection in American novels in the context of scientific, economic, and political changes during the long nineteenth century. Drawing on historical accounts as well as current critical interventions, I explore how writers wrestle with how the increasingly biological understanding of human life began shaping the body politic. The dead body provides an organizing principle as I develop a critical methodology for reading death in the nineteenth century against the grain of sentimentality and racial terror. By paying attention to dead bodies in genres of literature that eschew sentimentalism and didacticism in favor of satire and rebellion, I argue that the dead body can bear witness to the violence of white supremacy and capitalism, whilst also protesting these forces in material and discursive ways. In the proto-science fiction/utopian novels of Robert Montgomery Bird's 1836 Sheppard Lee: Written By Himself, Sutton E. Griggs' 1899 Imperium in Imperio, and Pauline E. Hopkins' Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self, serialized between 1902 and 1903, readers encounter scenes of the apparent death and dissection of Black and white protagonists. While Bird was a white physician and author writing in antebellum America, Griggs and Hopkins were Black authors writing post-Emancipation in the Jim Crow era. All three authors are united in observing how death's unruly presence resists the disciplinary technologies of biopolitics, racism, and sentimentality, and their weaponization against Black Americans. However, Griggs' and Hopkins' utilize fiction and science to reposition death not as inevitable but as a form of rebirth which enables utopian experiments in Black freedom, Black life, and Black futures.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Thesis
Flood, Karen Pomeroy;
(2001)
Contemplating corpses: The dead body in American culture, 1870-1920
Article
Susan E. Lederer;
Susan C. Lawrence;
(2022)
Rest in Pieces: Body Donation in Mid-Twentieth Century America
Article
Podgorny, Irina;
(2011)
Modern Embalming, Circulation of Fluids, and the Voyage through the Human Arterial System: Carl L. Barnes and the Culture of Immortality in America
Book
Tonia Sutherland;
(2023)
Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife
Article
Lynsey T Cullen;
(2017)
Post-mortem in the Victorian asylum: practice, purpose and findings at the Littlemore County Lunatic Asylum, 1886–7
Book
Hurren, Elizabeth T.;
(2012)
Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1834--1929
Article
Stern, Megan;
(2008)
“Yes:---no:---I have been sleeping---and now---now---I am dead”: Undeath,the Body and Medicine
Book
Åhrén, Eva;
(2009)
Death, Modernity, and the Body: Sweden 1870--1940
Book
Tinne Claes;
(2019)
Corpses in Belgian Anatomy, 1860–1914: Nobody’s Dead
Thesis
Troyer, John;
(2006)
Technologies of the Human Corpse
Book
Riccardo Roni;
(2023)
Filosofia, psicologia e letteratura in Francia (1896-1897). L'io dei morenti di Victor Egger e La psicologia del tubercoloso di Paul Xilliez nel sanatorio di Leysin
Article
Vallone, Lynne;
(2000)
Fertility, childhood, and death in the Victorian family
Article
Stolte, Tyson;
(2014)
“And Graves Give up Their Dead”: The Old Curiosity Shop, Victorian Psychology, and the Nature of the Future Life
Article
Jonathan Stafford;
(2024)
Spectacle and Sympathy in the Origin Narratives of Lifesaving at Sea
Article
Cassou-Noguès, Pierre;
(2011)
Exploring the Brain, Looking for Thoughts: On Asimov's Second Fantastic Voyage
Book
Jolene Zigarovich;
(2023)
Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Article
Chojnacki, Stanley;
(2015)
The Patronage of the Body: Burial Sites, Identity, and Gender in Fifteenth-Century Venice
Article
Bullen Presciutti, Diana;
(2015)
Domesticating Cannibalism: Visual Rhetorics of Madness and Maternal Infanticide in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Book
Suzanne Kelly;
(2015)
Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth
Article
Brown, Elizabeth A. R.;
(2014)
The French Royal Funeral Ceremony and the King's Two Bodies. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Ralph E. Giesey and the Construction of a Paradigm
Be the first to comment!