Sentimental literature of the nineteenth century depicts the struggles of errant young women as they attempt to achieve self-control and comply with normative ideals of feminine conduct. Religious piety often figures centrally in these efforts, as sentimental heroines learn to imitate Christ in their pursuit of self-mastery and acquire moral instruction through the study of scripture. Sentimentalism’s preoccupation with spiritual matters, however, did not preclude an interest in corporeal matters, and sentimental writers afford particular attention to the body. Focused principally on depicting female development – and sustained by women writers and readers alike – sentimentalism attended to the female body in particular and warned of the special dangers that it posed, whether through its susceptibility to seduction or through its capacity to instill vanity in worldly young women. Sentimentalism characterized the female body as an especial hazard in need of protection, and, through the repeated depiction of the perils that may befall the defenseless female body, sentimental texts often assumed a public pedagogic role in teaching female readers to exercise caution and avoid unnecessary danger.

Multiethnic American fiction frequently centers “hybrid” bodies within locales and stories that draw on multiple ethnicities, languages, and national traditions. By focusing on these bodies, it challenges a national aesthetic formalism that would command conformity and assimilation, unearthing the hybrid genealogies that subtend embodiment across borders. Put differently, by representing embodiments that derive meaning from the interstitial spaces between national projects, such literature decolonializes the seemingly constitutive relationship between the nation-state and the bodies that compose the populations subjected to its political mandates. “Multiethnic” as a literary category contravenes any articulation of a cohesive national identity grounded in notions of the body with faithful monolithic origins.

Reading “leaves no trace; its product is invisible,” or so Susan Stewart argues in On Longing, theorizing reading as an immaterial activity of the mind, implicitly divorced from the body.1 Sometime in 1865, as the Civil War was drawing to a close, Emily Dickinson came to a different conclusion in a short poem contesting such an ethereal conception of reading. The poem rehearses, rather cryptically, a scenario that had become tragically familiar in many households on both sides of the conflict, the reading of a letter announcing a soldier’s death and the devastating grief that the news of this loss caused in the surviving relatives.

The sufferings of the enslaved in the Americas and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were myriad and complex. They were general and particular – which is to say, on the one hand, elemental to the slave condition, and, on the other, differential according to age, sex, and (though often understated) geography. The regular allusions to the formerly enslaved narrators’ “life and sufferings” in the titles and subtitles of their published testimonies – Briton Hammon’s A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (1760), for instance, or The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher (1811) by John Jea – foreshadowed chroniclings of unspeakable abuses to the captives’ bodies and minds. While these violations of the physical and psychological personhood of the enslaved were so severe as to be mostly indivisible categories of Black captive injury, it is undeniable that they were borne on and by the body. Even as the most significant reflections on the body in antebellum American culture – Hortense Spillers, Walter Johnson, Thavolia Glymph, and Saidiya Hartman included – devote invaluable attention to the bodies of Black women and men in bondage, Toni Morrison also made clear in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) that Black captivity had deep consequences for enactments of white embodiment too.

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s landmark novel Ceremony (1977), Tayo – a Laguna man socially disfigured by losing his mother, suffering racism, and surviving combat in World War II – finally recovers his body by making love with T’seh, a mysterious woman living atop a sacred mountain. As Tayo’s journey to this place becomes more mystical by the day, we come to believe this injured man has entered a mythic land, where the Laguna rain deity takes him into her arms and melds him to women and earth.

Eli Clare’s groundbreaking memoir Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (1999) examines the intersections of class, queerness, and disability. Clare, influenced by queer women of color, disrupts the boundaries between gender identity, sexuality, and disability, demonstrating how these various identities are hopelessly entangled. For Clare, “[g]ender reaches into disability, disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race … everything finally piling into a single human body.”1 Clare articulates how queer/crip theories of the body disrupt normalcy and refuse easy answers as they question and blur the boundaries of identity and agency. Clare’s work is foundational to the subfield of disability studies called crip theory.

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).