Character is treated as a “key word” across this ambitious, wide-ranging study. The author, acknowledging Raymond Williams's critical practice, locates a linguistic space in which diverse social values and cultural beliefs are contested and a number of nineteenth-century discourses – political, literary, philosophical, pedagogical – intersect. Salazar is particularly concerned with how changing conceptions of character, in the period from 1850 to 1920, mediated relations between individuals and civic society – although as his chapters attend to works spanning the antebellum to the progressive era the book's title is arguably misleading. A “rhetoric of character,” he claims, arose in response to widespread anxiety concerning the possibly unverifiable nature of character and its seeming decline, and exists in contrast to definitions that associate the term with an interior, private self. Salazar demonstrates how such rhetoric is highly visible in sundry historical documents and literary texts of the period, and is particularly aligned to reform movements which put character-building in service to ideals of national identity and social progress. The manner in which “character” – in discourse and in bodily manifestations – becomes a potent term for American identity, and is literarily embodied in cultural practices and forms of physical display, is a focus which, Salazar contends, both revises previous constructions of the period and closes a gap in postnational critiques of class, gender, and race relations in late nineteenth-century America.

In a lengthy introductory chapter, in which Salazar summarizes his study's genealogy, that gap at times can appear to be a narrow one, although easy negotiation of multiple perspectives in literary-cultural studies provides evidence of the author's impressively thorough immersion in this critical territory. This is the effect of the first chapter as well, which focusses on Melville's The Confidence-Man as an illustration of the fictionality of character construction, and as documenting a mid-century social crisis reflecting the unease generated by an idea of the “intentional agent … as a hypothesis” (50). Such a claim is unobjectionable. But Salazar's analysis of the novel is often subject to overly abstract expression, and a tendency to repetitiveness, at the expense of further attention to the more original, suggestive material with which the chapter concludes. In the discussion of essays and manuals concerned with developing character, and written by authors as distinct from one another as Emerson, P. T. Barnum, and Booker T. Washington, fascinating intersections are brought to light. The manner in which the cultural and spiritual values articulated by such texts simultaneously challenged and sustained cultural norms is convincingly argued. These intersections continue to be thoughtfully investigated in the four chapters that follow. Here Salazar's declared purpose to concentrate on “diverse and hybrid” literary forms, often obscured by critical emphasis on realism in the period, comes into its own. Consideration is given both to another relatively familiar text – Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, persuasively situated amidst discourses of “boyology” and habit – and to lesser-known writings. The role muscular physique plays in the feminist politics and racial nationalism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's fiction is approached through revealing how an obsession with muscle building was emblematic of national fitness, especially as reflected in the National Police Gazette. Pauline Hopkins's novel Contending Forces is read through, and as a critique of, postbellum discourses of racial improvement and legitimacy, as well as scientific theories of racial character. In conclusion, the reform writings of Jane Addams are examined for how they redefined the charity relation as a class exchange valuing cultural difference and thus resisting assimilationist ideals of “Americanization.” Each of these case studies provides convincing illustration of how emerging conceptions of “character” were used to further individual and ideological ends in nineteenth-century America, although the effect public rhetoric had on private lives, or the reverse, is not as fully illustrated as it might have been. When Salazar does make such a move, as when drawing on biographical evidence to relate dimensions of a given writer's “character” to his or her own works, the link between public and private spheres, ideology and an individual life becomes additionally suggestive.

There is much to appreciate in the surprising directions and energetic discussions of Salazar's cultural history. Yet at times so intent is the author on promulgating his ideas that the texts which have generated them become prey to his own kind of rhetoric. An emphatic tone, rather than an accumulation of nuanced readings, is often relied on to strengthen arguments, and lines of analysis occasionally leap to risky generalizations. When discussing Twain, for example (whose satire may be underappreciated), the “bad-boy genre” is abruptly associated with “late nineteenth-century instruments of Americanization and imperial expansion” (81) in a manner that is overly reliant on another critical text to carry the weight of the author's point. The convincing arguments that Salazar draws from his material would have been more persuasive, and certainly more enjoyable, if his critical style did not so relentlessly eschew varieties of tone and the kind of speculation that allow material under scrutiny less-restricted meaning. And while the emphasis on “hybrid” or lesser-known texts is certainly welcome, there are neglected opportunities throughout for noticing the dialogue these works have with ones of a “purer” strain. This is especially true of those “realist” writers whom Salazar steadfastly and sceptically avoids, perhaps because of unexamined assumptions regarding what they are up to. Yet Salazar's choices are nonetheless fully justified by the discoveries his intellectually vigorous arguments offer, and Bodies of Reform amply succeeds in giving the term “character” a new series of meanings.