Linda Simon

A Small Boy and Others: A Critical Edition; Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition

and interpretation for post-bellum neurologists. This debate shadows Murison’s investment in reading practice and methodology, which she productively foregrounds in her introduction and coda. What kind of bodies do we need or want to imagine? What purposes do our contemporary attempts to locate physiological evidence serve? These questions take on additional energy in light of Murison’s clear demonstration that nervous embodiment makes cultural paradox uniquely visible. The Politics of Anxiety casts a wide net and will be useful to contemporary scholars concerned with affect, embodiment, neurology, and democratic participation. Murison’s epilogue demonstrates that contests over the embodied mind and the open body remained unresolved in the nineteenth century, and her attention to the mode of contemporary literary scholarship suggests that these tensions are still with us in the present