Promotional material for Karen Sanchez-Eppler's Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body, published by the University of California Press:

In this striking study of the pre-Civil War literary imagination, Karen Sanchez-Eppler charts how bodily difference came to be recognized as a central problem for both political and literary expression. Her readings of sentimental antislavery 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 with the sexually distinct and domestically circumscribed female body.

Moving from the public domain of abolitionist politics to the privacy of lyric poetry, Sanchez-Eppler argues that attention to the physical body blurs the boundaries between public and private. Drawing analogies between black and female bodies, feminist-abolitionists use the public sphere of antislavery politics to write about sexual desires and anxieties they cannot voice directly.

Sanchez-Eppler warns against exaggerating the positive links between literature and politics, however....

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