Date of Award

6-26-2026

Date Published

August 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Advisor(s)

Dorri Beam

Keywords

embodiment;gender;literature;material culture;race;sculpture

Subject Categories

American Literature | American Studies | Arts and Humanities

Abstract

Marble Bodies reads across both literary texts and sculptures to ask how sculptural logic operates across forms to reveal what sculptors and sculpture offer the field of nineteenth-century U.S. literary studies—formally, theoretically, and methodologically. It argues that sculpture functions not merely as subject matter within nineteenth-century American literature but as an interpretive framework that reveals how bodies are objectified, valued, and assigned cultural meaning. With attention to the formal and material properties of sculpture—stillness, smoothness, and duration—and to the questions of ideality, valuation, and preservation that sculpture generates, this dissertation shows how nineteenth-century writers and artists found in those properties alternatives to core representational problems of gender, race, and nation. The mostly-women authors and sculptors at its center include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Hosmer, Louisa Lander, Edmonia Lewis, and Pauline Hopkins. Each chapter pairs writers, sculptures, and/or sculptors who take up a common theme or subject matter to develop and model a sculptural reading practice. The four chapters posit an intimacy between nineteenth-century literary and sculptural history, arguing that sculpture’s stillness, its paradoxically fluid surface, or its durational temporality enables an alternative way of theorizing embodiment, resisting objectification, interrupting cultural narratives of elimination and racial violence, or imagining alternative forms of representing and preserving bodies. Ultimately, this dissertation proposes that learning to read sculpture in U.S. literary history is one way of learning to recognize, honor, and value the bodies and the persons that marble was made to represent.

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Open Access

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