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In "Blood of a Nation" I argue that U.S. authors' writing about human blood (both metaphorical and literal blood) changed during the second half of the nineteenth century. The chosen texts range from poetry to medical manuals to illustrate how authors increasingly superimposed medical blood tropes on Romantic metaphors. Medical language helped them bridge the conceptual gap between bodily fluid and social metaphor. By saddling aristocracy with medicine, writers created new fictions about blood, especially occult blood, which anchors metaphors of race and gender in the bodily fluid. I argue that they supplemented political blood metaphors in support of the new nation state with medicalized blood metaphors and thus made possible scientific racism, blood quanta, and their legal codification.Chapter one examines political blood metaphors, namely Nathaniel Hawthorne's erasure of the nation state's history of sovereign bloodshed in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Ludwig von Reizenstein's emphasis on the resulting uncanny nation filled with bloodshed in Die Geheimnisse von New Orleans (1853). Chapter two follows the rise of medical vocabulary from a school textbook to Civil War poetry and finally to a nationalist magazine. Emily Dickinson's Civil War poem "The name – of it – is 'Autumn'" (1862) rejects both contemporary Romantic blood metaphors and her anatomy textbook's taxonomy because neither adequately addresses the blood on the battlefield, a critique edited out in the poem's posthumous publication. Chapter three shows that Walt Whitman focused his collection Drum-Taps (1865) on the absorption of blood and hospital practice to reconcile the blood of the Civil War with his national vision. Chapter four argues medical texts about blood in practice really present political arguments. While William Wells Brown avoided blood in practice and theory, Edward H. Dixon made blood an occult sign for race and gender. Chapter five explores blood in scientific racism. Samuel A. Cartwright foreclosed individual agency and the freedom to change in the assertion that "black blood" is eternal and immutable. In his The Rising Son (1873), William Wells Brown ripostes that blood is a shared and mutable part of humanity. Chapter six considers the blood quanta of chattel slavery as laid out by Thomas Jefferson in 1815 as the root of the Jim Crow racism in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1893), and Pauline E. Hopkins' Of One Blood (1903). Against the resistance of black mothers, familial blood became an unknowable truth of the legal and social erasure of black families.

The partition narratives of South Asian authors are testimony to the fact that women of all ethnic and religious backgrounds were the greatest victims of the newly created border between India and Pakistan in 1947. Women's bodies were abducted, stripped naked, raped, mutilated (their breasts cut off), carved with religious symbols and murdered to be sent in train wagons to the "other" side of the border. Taking Bapsi Sidhwa's novel Ice Candy Man/Cracking India (1988) as a narrative example of the importance of women's point of view and as central figures of the violent conflict, we will examine the symbol of the female breasts, following Judith Butler's and Michel Foucault's theories on power and governmentality, framed in the rhetoric of Mother India, as the violence inflicted upon women was equivalent to a sacrilege against one's religion, family and country. Therefore, we will examine the passage of sacks of mutilated breasts as a terrifying testimonio about Partition history fictionally recalled, but also as a metaphor of the border crossing which threatens the stability of the nation. In the light of Julia Kristen's theory on the abjection, we will interpret the female corpses with mutilated breasts as abjects which blur the limits of a normative society, displaying its fragility. We will conclude by asserting that the novel discussed in this paper can be read as a harsh indictment of both a violent de/colonial process and local misogynist corruption (lessons from History) as well as a weapon of feminist resistance (doing Herstory). Women's mutilated bodies are uncovered by authors such as Bapsi Sidhwa in order to expose the tragedy and trauma so that the history/body dialectic (a tale of the violation of women's rights) can be, as a consequence, also uncovered.

In this article I describe how contemporary Swedish literature which thematizes cultural diversity is understood within a powerful discourse about the so-called multicultural society, centred on an opposition between a culturally homogenous past and a culturally diverse present, and emphasizing the phenomena ethnicity and identity. I also try to suggest an alternative way of relating literature to a society characterized by diversity. This suggestion is based on Walter Benn Michaels' and Nancy Fraser's analyses of the epoch of "posthistoricism" and "the postsocialist condition" respectively, and my argument is that the study of the relationship between literature and diversity should be undertaken from a transformative/deconstructive perspective.

Introduction : the naked editor -- Shocking the middle class -- An aristocracy of smut -- Decrypting EC Comics -- Reading Playboy for the science fiction -- Mad ones, Mad men -- White-collar masochism -- Afterword : transgression in the post-pornographic era