At first glance, this scene has nothing to do with war. Even though much of the book takes place during the Civil War, there are no references to the things we would expect from war literature – no soldiers, combat, weapons, or wounds. The tone is sentimental and religious, not realist and secular or even profane. The scene focuses on women and gentleness, highlighted by such alliterations as the “spring sunshine streamed” and “face … full” of “painless peace.” The passage does not portray men’s strength or masculinized heroism. And yet I want to start here, to suggest that this scene is not only a Civil War scene, but one that illuminates a key means by which American literature grapples with representations of the body at war: It focuses on white women’s suffering as an affirmation of national innocence.

This volume provides students of American literature with models and methods for approaching the question of embodiment. It underscores the body as at once dynamic – shaping our experience of the world through complex interplay between social and biological influences – and intersectional – resisting attempts for discrete analysis at every turn. By highlighting these two qualities, The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body foregrounds the body’s enmeshed interspersal throughout core concerns of American literary studies, including those focused on race, gender, sexuality, history, and ecology.

“Bodies tell stories.”1 So begins the fifth chapter of Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel of Hurricane Katrina’s racialized landscapes. The story follows fifteen-year-old Esch Batiste, a Black teenager living in rural poverty with her family along the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the days leading up to the 2005 storm. Pregnant and caught between emerging desires as an adolescent woman and compounding responsibilities as an expectant mother, Esch utters these words as she rushes into the family’s bathroom, bursting to pee, and sees her older brother Skeetah softly touching wounds on his stomach. Esch alludes to the stories revealed by her own pregnant belly and those inscribed on her brother’s torso, which tell of the ravaging of his body in exchange for resources. Ward weaves these corporeal stories into a broader narrative of racialized embodiment, structural abandonment, and environmental vulnerability as they inextricably entangle in the southern United States.

“Do we have a body – that is, not a permanent object of thought, but a flesh that suffers when it is wounded, hands that touch?” philosopher Merleau-Ponty asks.1

On December 19, 2019, J. K. Rowling, the British author of the popular Harry Potter series, tweeted her support of the view that it is impossible to change one’s sex. “Sex is real,” she claimed, and, by extension, immutable. Rowling was not writing in a vacuum. The notion of biological sex, its fixity and binary structure, is called upon time and again, often to dismiss claims for transgender rights. Faced with this context, a prominent response to Rowling’s tweet deserves attention. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times published essays by transgender writer-activists who explained how disappointed they were by Rowling’s position, especially given their attachment to her books.

“In literature I sensed the possibility of the integration of feeling/knowledge, rather than the split between the abstract and the emotional in which Western philosophy inevitably indulged,” writes Barbara Christian in her foundational discussion about Black feminist literary theory.1 While she critiques the veneration of theoretical abstraction, Christian, too, pushes against the biologically reductive, eurocentric preoccupation of white French feminist theorists who fixate on “the female body as the means to creating a female language.”2 Wary of producing a monolithic feminist literary theory herself, she draws our attention to the intertwined problems that emerge when we ask whose bodies, writings, theories, labors, experiences are centered. As Christian’s essay illustrates, feminist theory provides multitudinous convergent and divergent ways to understand bodies and their relations to and through the world via what has been variously termed “gender” and “sex.” To only define feminist theory as by women and for women ignores traditions from manifold configurations of histories, cultures, and politics that place different weight on the term “women” as they seek to comprehend, to critique, to survive, and to reimagine the world.

Disordered bodies preoccupied early British gothic novels: bodies unable to control their appetites or their fear; bodies in pain; bodies undone by emotions, violence and invasive institutions. Similarly, in the United States the first gothic author, Charles Brockden Brown, wrote fitfully plotted novels full of strange and unruly bodies, such as the odd-looking victim-villain Carwin in Wieland (1798), the diabolical ‘Indian’ in Edgar Huntley (1799), and the pestilent bodies gripped by yellow fever in Arthur Mervyn (1799).

Among the medical texts in early American physician Benjamin Rush’s library was a copy of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year. Three years before his own encounter with a devastating 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia, Rush penned in the volume, “For the instruction, & entertainment I have received from this book, I am truly thankful.”1 Rush underlined and marked key passages as well, including one about a physician combating disease with garlic, tobacco, and vinegar, and compiled an index including entries like “Origin of the plague,” “State of morals after the plague,” “The number who died of the plague & in what months,” and “Effects of terror.” Gleaning medical and social information about disease from this fictionalized account, Rush demonstrates how tightly literary and medical knowledge were intertwined in the early United States.

Commenting on her poetic engagement with Framed by Modernism (1996), the photographic collaboration between Carrie Mae Weems and Robert Colescott, the poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin remarks on how her response to the series ‘illuminates modernism’s yoke of representation when it comes to the black body’.1 The three photographs which Lundy encountered at the Montclair Art Museum are presented as portraits of Colescott, but the images also include Weems in the background, nude and standing in a corner of the room. The bodies of two Black artists are subject to the technological and aesthetic frame of the photographic medium, a racialising form that is accentuated by Weems’s signature black and white palette. But Weems is both behind the camera and in front of it, in a portrait that she did not have to be a part of, as though she is deliberately toying with the camera’s demands for Black legibility by willingly acquiescing to them. Martin sees in the image ‘a trajectory between historic representations of blackness, the representation of the female body by male artists and a unique tension between subject and object in which the lack of agency is not a devout positioning’.

In a 1703 discourse on the nature of comedy, Anglo-Irish dramatist George Farquhar declared “an English play is intended for the use and instruction of an English audience.” He further identified this audience as a “mixture of many nations” and as “a people not only separated from the rest of the world by situation, but different also from other nations as well in the complexion and temperament of the natural body as in the constitution of our body politick.”1 By “body politick,” Farquhar imagined an imperial nation defined by its variegation and collectivity. Theater scholars Jeffrey Richards and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon have adapted and applied Farquhar’s prescription for a national drama to the New World. Richards characterizes the American audience as “a changeable cluster of identities that individuals or groups might recognize as pertaining to them,” specifically a cluster of Irish, Black, female, and working-class identities that are not fixed or predetermined.

Tremper Longman begins the Companion by setting the stage for many of the chapters that follow. Of first importance is the fact that discussing ‘biblical wisdom literature’ is not as simple as it seems. For the category as such has been questioned, and, even among those scholars who agree to use the phrase, what it means and designates remains up for debate. Longman presents the various viewpoints in terms of the ‘traditional view’, reactions to it, and ‘the way forward’. Matters of genre, the grouping of biblical texts, and their social location or worldview arise, as do suspicions about how ‘wisdom literature’ came about within scholarship and a recent repudiation of what it has become. Longman’s way forward indicates that Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes do indeed have meaningful affinities, and that these texts can and should be studied together, as well as in relation to other OT texts.

J. L. Andruska sees close affinities between the Song of Songs and Wisdom Literature. She acknowledges that this is a minority position, surveying the history of reception, which has offered various alternative interpretations (e.g. literal, allegorical, cultic, feminist). She then defines Wisdom Literature, centralising the forms found in ANE advice literature, the concern for wisdom, and the intended character transformation of the audience. All of these are found in the Song. Andruska discusses the mashal (proverb) in 8:6-7 and the intergenerational instructions found in the refrains (2:7, 3:5, 8:4). She argues that the Song offers wisdom about love, didactically advocating one particular vision of love (in contrast to other ANE love songs, which give varied depictions of love). The purpose of the Song is to transform its readers into wise lovers who follow the example of the lovers in the Song.