Realist Ecstasy Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature

This book's significance lies in Lindsay Reckson's ability to rethink literary tropes and tactics through a profound attention to embodiment-bodily gesture, comportment, performance, reenactment. Realist Ecstasy traces how bodies come undone into practices that threaten the very category of the real. Theoretically fascinating and solidly grounded, Reckson's work places performance in conversation with photography and the literary, forcing each to account for one another across her archival ensemble. - Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains