Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2023 Institut des Amériques Award.

Overview

Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States examines how pain is represented in a range of literary texts and genres from the nineteenth-century US. It considers the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical implications of pain across the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Alice James, as the national culture of pain progressively transformed in the wake of the invention of anesthesia. Through examining the work of nineteenth-century writers, Constantinesco argues that pain, while undeniably destructive, also generates language and identities, and demonstrates how literature participates in theorizing the problems of mind and body that undergird the deep chasms of selfhood, sociality, gender, and race of a formative period in American history. Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States considers first Emerson's philosophy of compensation, which promises to convert pain into gain. It also explores the limitations of this model, showing how Jacobs contests the division of body and mind that underwrites it and how Dickinson challenges its alleged universalism by foregrounding the unshareability of pain as a paradoxical measure of togetherness. It then investigates the concurrent economies of affects in which pain was implicated during and after the Civil War and argues, through the example of James and Phelps, for queer sociality as a response to the heteronormative violence of sentimentalism. The last chapter on Alice James extends the critique of sentimental sympathy while returning to the book's premise that pain is generative and the site of thought. By linking literary formalism with individual and social formation, Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States eventually claims close reading as a method to recover the theoretical work of literature.

Full Product Details

9780192855596

Table of Contents

Reviews

Tracing the progression of the conception of pain as redemptive to one in which the amelioration of pain becomes the goal of personal and social effort, Constantinesco identifies a dichotomy that still preoccupies modern consciousness. He demonstrates how writers wrestled with complexities of interpreting pain as they relate to the formation of value and identity. Summing up: Recommended. * L. A. Brewer, CHOICE * In his important and illuminating book, Thomas Constantinesco demonstrates that pain has a central place in aesthetic, specifically literary, practices. Meticulous in its argumentation and elegant in its prose, Writing Pain takes as its central preoccupation the many forms that pain manifests on the written page. ... Above all, Writing Pain makes a sizeable contribution to literary studies of pain, in no small part because it deftly synthesises different (though not necessarily oppositional) approaches to examining pain at the nexus of historical, representational, and phenomenological worlds. * Textual Practice *

In his important and illuminating book, Thomas Constantinesco demonstrates that pain has a central place in aesthetic, specifically literary, practices. Meticulous in its argumentation and elegant in its prose, Writing Pain takes as its central preoccupation the many forms that pain manifests on the written page. ... Above all, Writing Pain makes a sizeable contribution to literary studies of pain, in no small part because it deftly synthesises different (though not necessarily oppositional) approaches to examining pain at the nexus of historical, representational, and phenomenological worlds. * Textual Practice *

In Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Thomas Constantinesco offers a brilliant analysis of how various 19th-century American authors have struggled with-and, to varying degrees, have succeed at-producing literary expressions of pain, expressions that are also, it is worth pointing out, part of a healing process. * Mark Niemeyer, Miranda * Tracing the progression of the conception of pain as redemptive to one in which the amelioration of pain becomes the goal of personal and social effort, Constantinesco identifies a dichotomy that still preoccupies modern consciousness. He demonstrates how writers wrestled with complexities of interpreting pain as they relate to the formation of value and identity. Summing up: Recommended. * L. A. Brewer, CHOICE * In his important and illuminating book, Thomas Constantinesco demonstrates that pain has a central place in aesthetic, specifically literary, practices. Meticulous in its argumentation and elegant in its prose, Writing Pain takes as its central preoccupation the many forms that pain manifests on the written page. ... Above all, Writing Pain makes a sizeable contribution to literary studies of pain, in no small part because it deftly synthesises different (though not necessarily oppositional) approaches to examining pain at the nexus of historical, representational, and phenomenological worlds. * Erica Fretwell, Textual Practice * Constantinesco's study is remarkable for its depth and breadth, its capacity to interweave a multiplicity of critical perspectives, and take into account both the historical context and the history of ideas without ever neglecting the nuances of the texts. Its careful close readings and constant attention to detail are certainly one of its strengths. The book's arguments are articulated with force and, in most cases, clarity. Readers will also appreciate the dense bibliography and precise references to ongoing debates. * Laure de Nervaux, Revue fran,caise d''etudes am'ericaines * The research offers many spurs to further thought. As it is, it not only is a book that develops the field's knowledge and understanding of the history and meanings of pain within the context of the medical humanities, but also a piece of work that introduces and theorizes new forms of political subjecthood that the carapace of nineteenth-century liberalism might otherwise obscure. * Edward Sugden, Transatlantica * Constantinesco invaluably contributes to historical literary scholarship by emphasizing pain's generative work as he illuminates the ways sentimentalism and anesthetizing politics unhelpfully seek to do away with pain. Writing Pain invites us to celebrate pain's 'messiness' rather than anesthetize it-a move that invites new thrilling examinations of identity and selfhood as well as the worlds and words born of pain. * Vivian Delchamps, Modern Philology * Building on Elaine Scarry's foundational description of pain as something that both destroys and elicits language, Thomas Constantinesco's elegant and beautifully written monograph shows how pain 'fuels the work of literature' in the era of the U.S. Civil War. Across various literary forms - from Emerson's essays to Dickinson's poetry to the diary of Alice James - the writers in this study grapple with various forms of pain: physical and psychological; individual and collective. * John Levi Barnard, IdeAs *

Author Information

Thomas Constantinesco is Professor of American Literature at Sorbonne Université, France. He also taught at Yale, Oxford, and Université de Paris. Between 2014 and 2019, he was a Junior Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France and, in 2019-2021, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Oxford. He is the author of Ralph Waldo Emerson: L'Amérique à l'essai (Éditions Rue d'Ulm, 2012). He has published essays on nineteenth-century American literature in such venues as The New England Quarterly, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, American Periodicals, and Textual Practice. With Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, he co-edited Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature (Routledge, 2015).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available