Introduction

Abstract

This Introduction sets out the theoretical and methodological stakes of the book, along with its historical range. It begins by exposing the problem of pain as a tension between the evidence of pain and its enigma, which the rest of the book investigates. It then develops the claim that pain, while undeniably destructive, is also generative—of language, subjectivities, and collectivities—as it circulates within and between persons and through writing. Linking literary formalism with individual and social formation, the chapter argues for close reading as a method to recover the theoretical work of literature. It further positions the argument within the field of pain studies, before tracing the main transformations of the United States’ culture of pain in the nineteenth century, from the rise of secularism, sentimentalism, and utilitarianism, to the invention of anesthesia and the development of tort law, as well as the politics of pain during the Civil War and in the early years of Reconstruction. It ends with an overview of the book’s structure that emphasizes the affordances of pain—their limitations and their potentialities—in the shaping of individual and collective identities.