Introduction: Medical Women in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Abstract

This introduction argues that the woman physician in American literature inhabits a liminal space, one that is reflected in the generic liminality formally used to contain her. I argue that the essays contained in this journal's issue, while widely divergent in their focus, scope, and topic, all share a concern with how literary genre functions as a space for liminal, transgressive medical women. This special issue, then, details examples of the way transgressive subjects register the transgressive generic spaces seeking to represent them.