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This essay argues that male bodies became a literary and cultural site for projecting and psychically processing contradictions in the late-nineteenth-century American economy that were generated by the financial chaos of a rapidly capitalizing, industrial nation, on the one hand, and the simultaneous trend toward business incorporation and greater rationalization, on the other. It focuses on Henry James's novel, The American, and on the emergence of boxing as a commercially successful spectator sport, which together demonstrate how late-nineteenth-century capitalism influenced conceptions of male bodies and how the body itself was used to represent economic shifts in American culture.

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