The Perfecting of Nature

The Perfecting of Nature, Josh Doty's fresh look at nineteenth-century American literature classics through the lens of contemporary scientific discourse on nutrition, health, and phrenology, makes the case that the focus of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes on “self-culture” (William Ellery Channing's 1838 lecture title) was a physical, as well as mental and moral, imperative. Key in his analysis are Sylvester Graham's text on dietary reform (his Graham cracker legacy is well known) and Orson Fowler's on phrenology, which were popular and influential. Both focused on what Doty calls “bioplasticity,” the belief that human bodies are malleable and can be re-formed by discipline, diet, exercise. Even Fowler's phrenology, often understood as a static picture of mental capacities, advocates practicing desirable qualities in the belief that corresponding areas of the brain could grow and develop, as with

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Culture of the United States · George (robot · Literature · Phrenology · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Classics · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · History · Medicine · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology · Thoreau and American Literature