(P)Rescription Narratives - (Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture) by Stephanie Peebles Tavera (Paperback)

About the Book

Examines how women writers of medical fiction rewrite cultural narratives of the female body against censorship under the Comstock Laws.

Book Synopsis

(P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock law era, this book astutely argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship. Woman-authored medical fiction exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body since subject formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop despite our efforts to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures - to censor, to resist, to interpret - open up a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy.

From the Back Cover

Examines how women writers of medical fiction rewrite cultural narratives of the female body against censorship under the Comstock Law (P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock Law era, this book astutely argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship. Woman-authored medical fiction exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body since subject formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop despite our efforts to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures - to censor, to resist, to interpret - open up a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy. Stephanie Peebles Tavera is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, Central Texas.

Review Quotes

[...] solidly sticks the landing as a daring, insightful, innovative, and highly relevant study.--Sara L. Crosby, The Ohio State University at Marion "American Literary History"

Brimming with heart and intelligence, (P)rescription Narratives turns to the fascinating topic of women's medical fiction to stimulate vital new conversations between medical humanities, disability studies and affect theory. The result is an invigorating diagnosis of the full slipperiness of the body as it appeared in the late nineteenth century: partly plastic, the result of social life impressing upon it and partly the product of the rigid molds of race, sex and ability. Tavera brilliantly locates women writers at the frictional space where these two paradigms collide, revealing how the materiality of language and the affective dimensions of narrative become their therapeutics to expose the contradictions of their era while attempting to free themselves from them.--Kyla Schuller, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Stephanie Peebles Tavera's (P)rescription Narratives makes an important contribution to the literary history of gender and medical narratives as well as intervening into critical conversations concerning literary affect and material feminisms. [...] While ambitious, Tavera's project succeeds in covering such a large scope. Her ability to connect each woman-authored narrative to the linguistic materiality that contextualizes those narratives allows readers to see each major intervention. Whether she is arguing that Gilman and Davis craft narrative animacy working against discourses trying to de-animate disabled female bodies or that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps creates the concept of the New Man as a rescript for the New Woman, thus working to heal traumas of national gender oppression, Tavera's study is always thoroughly developed and convincing. (P)rescription Narratives is crucial reading for anyone interested in the biosocial history of gender, race, and disability in American studies.--Margaret Jay Jessee "Transatlantica"

Tavera has conducted impressive, original archival and legal research in addition to delving into pertinent secondary historical sources. The author also deserves praise for her deft yet restrained use of personal and family history to bring her observations home. Equally praiseworthy is her sustained and simultaneous attention to ascriptive identities of gender, race, and disability as well as to their inextricable entanglement... Tavera deserves much credit for her deep dive into what has regrettably become the newly germane Comstock era and for making an ardent case throughout her thought-provoking book for a "new theoretical framework" mirroring the one she offers us, where concepts "like (p)resecription, animacy, sentimental biopower, and crip affect" help "(re)imagine and (re)theorize the oppositional power of nineteenth-century women writers of medical fiction".--Cynthia J. Davis, University of South Carolina "Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature"

About the Author

Stephanie Peebles Tavera is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, Central Texas. She is author of the critical introduction to Helen Brent, M.D. by Annie Nathan Meyer (Hastings College Press, 2020), a medical novel that she recovered from the archives and for which she won an honorable mention Book Edition Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Tavera's research focuses on American women's literature, medical humanities, disability studies, and crip affect. She has published work in Legacy, Utopian Studies, and Science Fiction Studies academic journals.