Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body

In this striking study of the pre–Civil War literary imagination, Karen Sánchez—Eppler charts how bodily difference came to be recognized as a central problem for both political and literary expression. Her readings of sentimental anti—slavery fiction, slave narratives, and the lyric poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson demonstrate how these texts participated in producing a new model of personhood—one in which the racially distinct and physically constrained slave body converged alon...