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The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class.As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some—like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton—challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others—like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac—offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.

Victorian Ethical Optics asks how artists and authors in the Victorian period answer the ethical question of how one should live with others by turning to a more specific one: how should one look at others? Looking would seem to necessarily lead to interpretation and judgment, but this book shows how Victorian artists and authors imagined other ethical and optical relations. In an era in which aberrant, deformed, and disabled bodies proliferated--particularly those bodies ravaged by industrial labor and poverty--the ideological and economic stakes of looking at such bodies peaked; moreover, as work became a gospel and the question of deservingness became central, looking at aberrant bodies was always a matter of ethics and politics. The aesthetic thinking of John Ruskin animates the visual ethics at the center of this book, as he advocates for'innocence of the eye,'which calls for a return to infantile sight of a kind that precedes judgment or classification. Although Ruskin understands such innocence to be an asymptote, optical innocence remains an ethical demand, and it is to this demand that this book attends. Among the authors and artists included are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Encounters between normative and aberrant characters or figures within a text or visual object shape the encounter that the external reader or viewer has with those same aberrant bodies. The category of the aberrant draws on ideas from queer and disability studies but makes a case for a broader understanding of strange bodies; in this book, aberrant bodies are those whose visible forms lead to a breakdown in cognition, a breakdown that makes space for the innocent eye to move. In thinking about such bodies, this book introduces the term extranormative to explain the complex and often complicit relationship these figures exemplify in relation to a (surprisingly expansive) Victorian norm. Thinking in terms of extranormativity as an essential feature of Victorian life disrupts tired notions of the period as one in which a narrow definition of bourgeois normativity took hold.

Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary and filmic representations of vulnerability depict embodied forms of vulnerability across languages, media, genres, countries, and traditions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The volume gathers 12 chapters penned by scholars from Japan, the USA, Canada, and Spain which look into the representation of vulnerability in human bodies and subjectivities. Not only is the array of genres covered in this volume significant— from narrative, drama, poetry, (auto)documentary, or film— in fiction and nonfiction, but also the varied cultural and linguistic coordinates of the literary and filmic texts scrutinized—from the USA, Canada, Spain, France, the Middle East, to Japan. Readers who decide to open the cover of this volume will benefit from becoming familiar with a relatively old topic— that of vulnerability— from a new perspective, so that they can consider the great potential of this critical concept anew.

Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program—a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program at : https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/FOBP/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/14996.

‘Corporeal Battlegrounds'explores the depiction and critical potential of the entanglement of work and embodiment in contemporary realist U.S.-American novels. It argues that manifesting the elusive effects of contemporary capitalism in the figure of the laboring body allows for a critique of capitalism. The laboring body thus provides a gateway to understanding how power relations are perpetuated by the work we engage in and to revealing the inherent logic of capitalism. To provide a comprehensive view, each larger section examines one aspect of contemporary capitalism in conversation with a novel: social acceleration, digitalization, financialization, and 24/7 capitalism. These sections question how the novels approach the representability of economic relations and how the depiction of the laboring body functions to open up an area of tension to criticize the link between the laboring body, economic participation, and the perception of failure and success.

Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period's rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses—such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons—the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation.Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself—its parts, or its preserved representation—functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory.Zigarovich's analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.

The Witness and the Body in Auschwitz: Early Literary Accounts of the Camp Experience examines bodily descriptions from early testimonies of concentration camp survivors focusing on questions related to meanings of corporeality, as well as to Holocaust researchers, and links the discourse of the body with a social cartography of the Auschwitz camp complex. The heart of the book is comprised of memory-based texts written by survivors in the early years after the war. The early texts discussed were written in Polish and while some became internationally recognized, others, remain virtually unknown, especially outside of Poland. These early memoirs and literary works help navigate the space of the Auschwitz camp complex from the perspective of the victims'based on their experiences and decipher those areas devoid of narratives, spaces of “total annihilation.” Literary accounts and early testimonies allow us to map the space of the camp differently than through the documents produced by the Nazi-perpetrators. Such a social cartography also includes specific gendered differences and allows Karwowska to critically analyze sensitive questions related to the body, gender, and sexuality of a prisoner.

John Donne's Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical knowledge – a rapidly changing field in early modern England – on the poetry and prose of John Donne (1572–1631). This knowledge played a crucial role in shaping how Donne understood his everyday experiences, and how he conveyed those experiences in his work. Examining a wide range of his texts through the lens of medical history, this study contends that Donne was both a product of his period and a remarkable exception to it. He used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his ideas resonate with his original audience and that still illuminate his ideas for readers today.

Figures de l'excès chez Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes et Marina de Van de Dominique Carlini Versini interroge les images du corps excessif qui traversent les récits d'artistes contemporaines françaises selon une approche intermédiale. À partir des années 1990, une tendance à l'excès a été observée dans la fiction française. D'un côté, de jeunes écrivaines s'attachent à mettre en scène le corps de manière particulièrement crue. En même temps, un nouveau courant se développe au cinéma caractérisé par des images explicites ou violentes du corps. L'approche inédite de l'ouvrage consiste à comparer les stratégies des deux moyens d'expression pour délivrer une expérience esthétique incarnée tout en démontrant que cette recherche formelle va de pair avec une réflexion poétique sur les frontières (matérielles, culturelles et symboliques) du corps. Figures de l'excès chez Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes et Marina de Van by Dominique Carlini Versini examines textual and visual images of the excessive body that run through the narratives of contemporary French women artists. From the 1990s onwards, a tendency towards excess has been observed in French fiction. On the one hand, young female writers have portrayed the body in a particularly crude manner. Meanwhile, a new trend has developed in film characterised by explicit or violent images of the body. The monograph's original approach is to compare the strategies of the two mediums to generate an embodied aesthetic experience while demonstrating that this formal experimentation goes hand in hand with a poetic reflection on the (material, cultural and symbolic) boundaries of the body.

«In this important comparative study, Polly Galis provides an illuminating – and frank – examination of the feminist tensions inherent in the inclusive and often transgressive modalities of female sexuality put forward by Nancy Huston, Nelly Arcan and Annie Ernaux, writers whose work subversively troubles the divide between'good'and'bad'models of bodily pleasure and desire.» (Siobhán McIlvanney, Professor of French and Francophone Women's Writing, King's College London) «An in-depth look at three important French-language women writers who tackle gender stereotypes, desire, the body, language and empowerment, this richly documented study is rigorous, thorough, illuminating and highly readable, with broader implications for contemporary feminism and women's writing within and beyond France and Quebec. A major contribution.» (Lori Saint-Martin, Professor of Literary Studies, University of Quebec in Montreal) This book is the first comparative study of the work of Francophone authors Annie Ernaux, Nancy Huston and Nelly Arcan, exploring their representation of sex, sexuality and the body. This book examines their narrative treatment of dominant sexual discourses, sexual difference and diverse feminine bodily experience, and thereby reveals these writers'distinctive contribution to contemporary women's writing in French and different feminisms, defined as «frank» French feminism. This feminist approach consists in tackling gender inequality, sexism and misogyny, while recognising the difficulties involved in feminist action, and acknowledging that adherence to allegedly oppressive gender stereotypes can actually prove enjoyable and empowering for women. This study examines the authors'earliest to latest publications and multiple genres and media, including fictional and autofictional novels, autobiographies, critical essays, phototexts, diaries, journals, illustrated oeuvres, media addresses and newspaper articles. This book project was the Winner of the 2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Contemporary Women's Writing in French.

Sacred Body: Readings in Jewish Literary Illumination provides fresh and insightful interpretations of Jewish texts, narratives, and cultural practices that show how these artifacts unhinge the “sacred” from the divine and focus instead on the “everyday sacred” of a dynamic earthly existence that emphasizes the body, celebrates life-affirming decisions, actions, and relationships, and avoids abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism. Roberta Sabbath argues that a diverse array of Jewish artifacts, from sacred scripture to contemporary novels and ballet performance, articulate a tradition that has existed for millennia in mythic, proto-historic, legalistic, mystical, philosophical, and aesthetic expressions of Jewishness. The author refers to this tradition as Jewish literary illumination, and she deftly demonstrates how it illuminates the most salient message of Judaism: that earthly existence and the body are also the site of the spiritual and the sacred.

« L'amour et l'écriture ont la même origine charnelle, ils viennent du même brasier » ou « chaque nouveau livre est un premier amour » ne sont que deux des nombreuses affirmations où l'écrivaine franco-algérienne Nina Bouraoui (née en 1967) établit une cohérence immédiate entre corps, désir et texte. En effet, désir et écriture partagent une même intimité, une même fragilité en même temps qu'une même violence. Chez Bouraoui, le désir devient non seulement le moteur de l'écriture mais également la source d'une esthétique « violente », en rébellion contre des cadres narratifs/grammaticaux et littéraires autant que socio-politiques et sexuels. L'interdépendance entre désir, corps et écriture crée une proximité entre sexualité et textualité qui représente le centre des analyses littéraires dans cet ouvrage. Pour élargir la question du corps/du sexe dans l'écriture, l'esthétique physique de Nina Bouraoui est mise en parallèle avec d'autres auteures dont elle se dit influencée, en particulier Marguerite Duras et Annie Ernaux. Une parenthèse analysera finalement les proximités thématiques et stylistiques entre La Nausée sartrien et le roman Standard de Nina Bouraoui pour montrer la manière dont l'absence de désir mène forcément à une absence d'écriture : ou bien à une écriture blanche.

Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction introduces readers to key theorists and shifting critical trends in the field from 1940 to the present and examines these in relation to close readings of texts from a range of different genres. It argues that scholarship on literature and the body is of fundamental importance to discussions about gender, race, sexuality, class, age, narrative form, and processes of reading and writing. Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction understands'literature'in a broad sense: as fundamentally connected to changes in technology, culture and the environment. Offering a lively and accessible synthesis, it explores how literary writing of present and recent decades is concerned with the challenges of conveying physical experiences, experimenting with sensory perception, and thinking through the relationship between embodiment, identity and knowledge.

Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of'low'and'slangular'(his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens's use of bodily idioms—'right-hand man,''shoulder to the wheel,''nose to the grindstone'—against the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London's streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the possibilities they opened up for artistic expression. Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination establishes a unique framework within the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain for rethinking Dickens's literary trajectory and its impact on the vocabularies of generations of novelists, critics, and speakers of English.

Following a resurgence of interest in Daphne du Maurier's writing, The Pathology of Desire in Daphne du Maurier's Short Stories offers an overview of all her collections and a detailed reading of nine stories. These contain recurrent references to the incomplete or impaired human form and are best read through a corporeal lens. The criticism illustrates her importance as a cultural commentator fascinated by the results of frustrated human desire, and includes a synopsis of the published collections, and the stories within them, to give the reader a sense of the variety of the overarching themes and the persistent force of corporeality in the stories. Du Maurier is well-known as a novelist, but her short fiction is pivotal to understanding her position and influence as a writer. She rewrites fairytales and foregrounds female violence long before it became a cultural trend.

Examines the interrelation of the bodily and the textual in four early modern literary examples of bad behaviorBroadens the scope of current understandings of early modern literature by identifying and analysing the significance of genre to representations of resistance to behavioural normsBrings together a variety of texts that are not usually considered side by side (Elizabethan and Jacobean devil plays, non-conformist life writing, picaresque prose), using this carefully-chosen mix of texts to explore social norms as a generic concernProvides a definitive study of texts lacking a substantial critical apparatus, like Grim the Collier of CroydonComparatively analyses early modern Anglophone texts alongside Spanish picaresque prose thus opening out new avenues in comparative literary studies Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature explores texts shaped by collisions between the idiosyncrasies of individual bodyminds and the values of small communities such as religion, sect, social milieu, congregation and family. The book encompasses the period from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, examining early modern shrew and devil plays, picaresque and rogue literature, and Quaker life-writing. Refusing to Behave examines the ways in which Thomas Dekker, Thomas Ellwood, Mateo Alemán and his translator James Mabbe, and the anonymous author of Grim the Collier of Croydon use textual tricks to provoke bodily responses in readers, and also draw on readers'bodily experiences to enrich their textual descriptions. This study broadens the scope of current understandings of early modern literature by identifying and analysing the significance of genre to representations of resistance to behavioural norms.

Graphic Criticism analyzes the semantic families of one hundred Anglophone novels written between 1719 and 1997. The analysis demonstrates that these novels embed a code for semantic distribution, and that code is the way that cultural values are transmitted. The longitudinal aspect of the analysis illuminates what T.S. Eliot called'tradition.'Graphic Criticism also zooms in on the particulars of a variety of the corpus texts to reveal Eliot's'individual talent.'Thus while the corpus indicates that the proportion of any semantic feature is consistent across time, each writer creatively works and plays with that feature in his or her own style.

Si « l'ostentation des corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres semble constituer l'une des caractéristiques de la littérature et des arts européens du XVIe siècle et XVIIe siècle », liée en partie à un contexte violent de guerres de religion puis de mise en place de l'État moderne, qu'en est-il aujourd'hui dans nos sociétés contemporaines marquées par une hypermédiatisation de la violence? L'ouvrage cherche à identifier et à interroger la représentation des corps meurtris, souffrants et sans vie dans la littérature et dans les arts actuels du monde occidental. En effet, la violence faite au corps et la fascination, parfois morbide, que procure le spectacle de la souffrance et de la mort se retrouvent dans bon nombre de disciplines, comme la peinture, le cinéma, le théâtre, la danse ou la performance, mais aussi en littérature, dans le roman policier, le roman autobiographique ou la littérature de jeunesse ou encore dans les séries télévisées, la bande-dessinée, etc. Malade, blessé, torturé, mutilé, mort…, partout où il est évoqué et/ou exhibé, le corps est susceptible de dévoiler sa vulnérabilité. Mais quel sens accorder à une telle représentation des corps dans une époque où les contenus violents sont quasi-omniprésents? Quels sont les enjeux de la mise en récit et de la mise en scène du corps violenté? Que nous dit ce corps sur le rapport à soi, aux autres, au monde? Quelle est sa portée esthétique et politique?

This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women's writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women's literary history.Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of'tradition'have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women's struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women's oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy.The book will be of interest to students and researchers of African literature, but also feminist literary scholars and comparatists more generally.

Wird Christoph Martin Wieland in der Forschung immer wieder als Skeptiker gehandelt, so zeigt diese Studie, dass es gewisse anthropologische Grundüberzeugungen gibt, an denen Wieland sein Leben lang festhält. Es sind Annahmen über die Natur des Menschen und das menschliche Miteinander, die für Wieland evident sind, weil er sie durch die Geschichte, seine eigene Erfahrung und den gesunden Menschenverstand bestätigt sieht. Sie bilden ein konstantes, anthropologisches Fundament, auf welchem Wielands Sujets, seine philosophischen Überlegungen sowie sein Dichtungs- und Bildungsverständnis gründen.

Sept des plus grandes écrivaines contemporaines sont représentées dans cette étude : Marie NDiaye, Maryse Condé, Maylis de Kerangal, Linda Lê, Marie Nimier, Marie Darrieussecq et Annie Ernaux. Chacune de ces auteures témoigne à sa façon d'une inquiétude face à une société parcourue de relations de pouvoir inégales. Leurs récits semblent exiger de nous que nous nous fassions un « sang d'encre » à l'instar de leurs personnages féminins, dont le corps est menacé, mis à rude épreuve ou encore soumis à des métamorphoses incertaines. Un sentiment diffus d'inquiétante étrangeté pénètre la fabrique de l'écriture. Ce sont les modalités de l'expression de ce sentiment que nous nous proposons d'analyser ici.

Hunger and Postcolonial Writing explores contemporary postcolonial fiction and life-writing from various geo-political contexts. The focus of this work is hunger; individuated in the self-imposed starvation of the hunger protester, and on a mass scale in the form of famine and food insecurity. It considers the hungry colonial and postcolonial body, examines its textual forms and historical trajectories, and situates it within the food security context of imperialism and its legacies. This book is the first monograph-length study of hunger within a postcolonial/world literary context. Its transcolonial focus produces comparative readings across postcolonial writings, facilitating productive analyses of the operations of imperialism and its aftereffects across heterogenous zones of colonialism. This project reads hunger as defined by the social, cultural, historical, and economic engagements produced by colonial and postcolonial encounters. Examining the starving colonialized body through Cartesian models of somatic subjectivity, and considering how this body is mediated by post-Enlightenment discourses of Modernity and progress, this work interrogates the contradictions produced by the starving colonial body as it is positioned between the possibility of radical protest and prescriptive colonial discourse. This book will be of interest to Gastrocritical and Postcolonial scholars and students, and to Food scholars more broadly.

This open access book investigates imaginaries of artificial limbs, eyes, hair, and teeth in British and American literary and cultural sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture shows how depictions of prostheses complicated the contemporary bodily status quo, which increasingly demanded an appearance of physical wholeness. Revealing how representations of the prostheticized body were inflected significantly by factors such as social class, gender, and age, Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture argues that nineteenth-century prosthesis narratives, though presented in a predominantly ableist and sometimes disablist manner, challenged the dominance of physical completeness as they questioned the logic of prostheticization or presented non-normative subjects in threateningly powerful ways. Considering texts by authors including Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle alongside various cultural, medical, and commercial materials, this book provides an important reappraisal of historical attitudes to not only prostheses but also concepts of physical normalcy and difference.

(P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock law era, this book astutely argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship. Woman-authored medical fiction exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body since subject formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop despite our efforts to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures – to censor, to resist, to interpret – open up a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy.

Using both textual and iconographic sources, this richly illustrated book examines the representations of the body in Greek Old and Middle Comedy, how it was staged, perceived, and imagined, particularly in Athens, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. The study also aims to refine knowledge of the various connections between Attic comedy and comic vases from South Italy and Sicily (the so-called'phlyax vases'). After introducing comic texts and comedy-related vase-paintings in the regional contexts, The Comic Body in Ancient Greek Theatre and Art, 440-320 BCE considers the generic features of the comic body, characterized as it is by a specific ugliness and a constant motion. It also explores how costumes —masks, padding, phallus, clothing, accessories— and gestures contribute to the characters'visual identity in relation with speech : it analyzes the cultural, social, aesthetic, and theatrical conventions by which spectators decipher the body. This study thus leads to a re-examination of the modalities of comic mimesis, in particular when addressing sexual codes in cross-dressing scenes which reveal the artifice of the fictional body. It also sheds light on how comic poets make use of the scenic or imaginary representations of the bodies of those who are targets of political, social, or intellectual satire. There is a particular emphasis on body movements, where the book not only deals with body language and the dramatic function of comic gesture, but also with how words confer a kind of poetic and unreal motion to the body.

Demonstrates the embodied foundation of figurative, poetic and literary language and form.

Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature.Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite – closure, containment and stoniness – and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which'female'porosity and'manly'stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity.This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and'feminine'genres, such as'sloppy'letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.

This book examines the fictional female bodies of four stylistically distinct comics artists in the United States—Chris Ware, Emil Ferris, Ebony Flowers, and Tillie Walden—whose work has attracted significant attention. These bodies showcase how comics and its unique visual language can both critique and re-envision some of the most challenging social issues of our time.The characters analyzed in this book illustrate diverse techniques for projecting the complex humanity and'truth'of U.S. women's unruly bodies onto a two-dimensional page. All of the protagonists qualify as'outsider'in some way, whether by gender identity, sexuality, ability, religion, race, class, ethnicity, age, or a combination of these and other categories. These bodily expressions of outsider identity both resist traditional categorization and stereotypes, and sometimes harness and employ those stereotypes for the purposes of parody or social critique. The language of comics affords a unique opportunity for complex representation of these disparate women's bodies, especially when comics artists use the full range of tools at their disposal, such as style, materials, narrative direction, the space of the gutter, and the friction between word and image. This is an a timely and important intervention suitable for researchers and students in comics studies, gender studies, literature and queer studies.

This edited collection explores the image of the wound as a ‘cultural symptom'and a literary-visual trope at the core of representations of a new concept of selfhood in Early Modern Italian and English cultures, as expressed in the two complementary poles of poetry and theatre. The semantic field of the wounded body concerns both the image of the wound as a traumatic event, which leaves a mark on someone's body and soul (and prompts one to investigate its causes and potential solutions), and the motif of the scar, which draws attention to the fact that time has passed and urges those who look at it to engage in an introspective and analytical process. By studying and describing the transmission of this metaphoric paradigm through the literary tradition, the contributors show how the image of the bodily wound—from Petrarch's representation of the Self to the overt crisis that affects the heroes and the poetic worlds created by Ariosto and Tasso, Spenser and Shakespeare—could respond tothe emergence of Modernity as a new cultural feature.

This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare's and his contemporaries'drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Phenomenology of pregnancy is a fairly new and radical body of philosophy that questions the post-Cartesian chasm of an almost autonomous reason and an enclosed and self-sufficient (male) body as foundations of identity. Early modern drama, as is argued, was written and staged at the backdrop of revolutionary changes in medicine and science where old and new theories on the embodied self-clashed. In this world where more and more men were expected to steadily grow isolated from their bodies, the pregnant body constituted an embattled contradiction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment this book offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a plethora of pregnant characters and their “pregnant embodiment” in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency. Despite seemingly disparate experiences of the selected heroines and the repeated attempts at containment of their “unruly” bodies, the ever transforming and “spatial” pregnant identities remain loci of embodied selfhood and agency. This book provocatively argues that fictional characters'experience reflects tangible realities of early modern women, while often deflecting the scientific consensus on reproduction in the period.

Melville's Other Lives is the first book-length study on The Piazza Tales—Herman Melville's only authorized collection of short fiction published in his lifetime—and the first book to explore the rich and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of Melville's stories.As Christopher Sten shows, all of the stories in The Piazza Tales present encounters between established white male figures: a writer, a lawyer, a ship captain, a homeowner, an architect, a world traveler, and characters who are outsiders, minorities, outcasts, or'others': a seamstress, an office drudge, enslaved Africans, a traveling salesman, island castaways, the poor. In each, Melville concentrates on the trials of the human body, its pain and trauma, its struggles and frustrations. Some tales concern common trials such as illness or invalidism ('The Piazza'), the tedium of office work ('Bartleby'), or the aggravation of door-to-door salesmen ('The Lightning-Rod Man'). Others concern extraordinary trials: the traumatic violence of a rebellion on a slave ship ('Benito Cereno'), the hardships of surviving on a wasteland archipelago ('The Encantadas'), the perils of creating a monstrous'man-machine'('The Bell-Tower'). In their concern for the cultural meanings of such trials, Melville's stories look forward to the work of Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and other cultural materialists who have shown how cultures define, control, and oppress bodies based on their otherness. As a storyteller, Melville understood how such cultural dynamics operate and seized on our collective obsession with the human body as subject, symbol, and vehicle to dramatize his tales.

We read not only with our eyes and minds, but with our entire body. In With Bodies, Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen move systematically through all elements of narrative and put them into dialogue with recent research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of mind to investigate what it means to read literary narratives bodily. They draw their findings from a wide corpus of material—narratives from antiquity to the present and composed in various languages, from Apuleius's Metamorphoses to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall—and craft their embodied narratology to retool current theories about authors, narrators and characters, time and space in storyworlds, and plot. Their investigation serves as a foundation for wider discussions on embodied narratology's contributions to literary history, computation and AI, posthumanism, gender studies, and world literature.

Texte der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur konfrontieren Rezipienten und Rezipientinnen mit Körperbildern, die entlang vielfältiger Formen der Ex- und Inklusion sowie Transgression gezeichnet werden. Zu nennen sind in diesem Zusammenhang Autoren und Autorinnen wie Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Sibylle Berg, Clemens J. Setz, Charlotte Roche, Jonas Lüscher und Daniel Kehlmann. Die Beiträger und Beiträgerinnen des Bandes zeigen, wie sie Körper entwerfen, die kontrastiv zum ideal-schönen Körperbild der Konsum- und Warenwelt unserer Gegenwart stehen und mittels der Operationen ›Öffnung‹, ›Schließung‹ und ›Übertritt‹ die Frage nach Körpergrenzen neu verhandeln.

Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture questions how a wide selection of restrictive norms come to bear on the body, through a close analysis of a range of texts, media and genres originating from across the francophone world and spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each essay troubles hegemonic, monolithic perceptions and portrayals of racial, class, gender, sexual and/or national identity, rethinking bodily norms as portrayed in literature, film, theatre and digital media specifically from a queer and querying perspective. The volume thus takes «queer(y)ing» as its guiding methodology, an approach to culture and society which examines, questions and challenges normativity in all of its guises. The term «queer(y)ing» retains the celebratory tone of the term «queer» but avoids appropriating the identity of the LGBTQ+ community, a group which remains marginalized to this day. The publication reveals that evaluating the bodily norms depicted in francophone culture through a queer and querying lens allows us to fragment often oppressive and restrictive norms, and ultimately transform them.

A radical reinterpretation of Willa Cather's oeuvre

Awareness of the role that physical difference plays in an individual's ability to negotiate personal and cultural spaces has spread into a variety of disciplines within the past two decades. This collection of essays adds to the growing corpus of work exploring the body as a site of cultural inscription by focusing exclusively on how this process plays out in the sphere of popular culture. The nine essays in this collection touch on a variety of topics of interest to both scholars and students of the body, ranging from contested issues within the discourse on fat and anorexia, to tattoos, domestic violence campaigns, mastectomy, neurasthenia, and gendered identity. By drawing on the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities, this collection provides models of how different disciplines approach the body. By incorporating perspectives from new and emerging fields like New Historicism, as well as Queer Theory, Fat, and Disability Studies, it simultaneously demonstrates how the use of a body perspective can expand and enliven understanding within these disciplines, and thus should be of interest to a wide variety of readers.

Winner of the PROSE Award (2022) for ClassicsThis book argues for a new way of reading tragedy that attends to how bodies in the ancient plays pivot between subject and object, person and thing, living and dead, and so serve as vehicles for confronting the edges of the human. At the same time, it explores the ways in which Greek tragedy pulls up close to human bodies, examining their physical edges, their surfaces and parts, their coverings or nakedness, and their postures and orientations. Drawing on and advancing the latest interplays of posthumanism and materialism in relation to classical literature, Nancy Worman shows how this tragic enactment may seem to emphasize the human body, but in effect does something quite different. Greek drama instead often treats the body as a thing that has the status and implications associated with other objects, such as a cloak, an urn, or a toy for a dog.Tragic Bodies urges attention to key scenes in Greek tragedy that foreground bodily identifiers as semiotic materializing. This occurs when signs with weighty symbolic resonance distil out on the dramatic stage as concrete sites for contention and conflation orchestrated through proximity, contact, and sensory dynamics. Reading the dramatic script in this way pursues the felt knowledge at the body's edges that tragic representation affords, a consideration attuned to how bodies register at tragedy's unique intersections – where directive and figurative language combine to highlight visual, tactile, and aural details.

This book explores the body's physical limits and the ways in which the confines of the body are delineated, transgressed, or controlled in literary and philosophical texts. Drawing on classics, philosophy, religious studies, medieval studies, and critical theory and examining material ranging from Homer to Game of Thrones, this volume facilitates an interdisciplinary investigation into how the boundaries of the body define the human form in language. This volume's essays suggest that the body's meaning is perhaps never more evident than in the violation of its wholeness. The boundaries of the body are areas of transition between states and are therefore vulnerable. As individuals find themselves isolated from their world and one another, their bodies regularly allow for physical interactions, incur transgressions and violations, and undergo profound transformations. Thus sympathy, sexuality, disease, and violence are among the main themes of the volume, which, ultimately, reexamines the place of the body in our understanding of what it means to be human.

Many of the best-known British authors of the 1800s were fascinated by the science and technology of their era. Dickens included spontaneous human combustion and'mesmerism'(hyptnotism) in his plots. Mary Shelley created the immortal Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his creature. H.G. Wells imagined the Time Machine, the Invisible Man, and invaders from Mars. Percy Shelley was as infamous at Oxford for his smelly experiments and for his atheism. This book of essays explores representations of technology in the work of various nineteenth-century British authors. Essays cluster around two important areas of innovation-- transportation and medicine. Each essay contributor accessibly maps out the places where art and science meet, detailing how these authors both affected and reflected the technological revolutions of their time.

The body in dreams, myths, legends, and anecdotes of the fantastic as expressions of human corporeality.In The Body Fantastic, Frank Gonzalez-Crussi looks at the human body through the lens of dreams, myths, legends, and anecdotes of the bizarre, exploring the close connection of the fictitious and the fabulous to our conception of the body. He chronicles, among other curious cases, the man who ate everything (including boiled hedgehogs and mice on toast), the therapeutic powers of saliva, hair that burst into flames, and an “amphibian man” who lived under water. Drawing on clinical records, popular lore, and art, history, and literature, Gonzalez-Crussi considers the body in both real and imaginary dimensions.Myths and stories, Gonzalez-Crussi reminds us, are the symbolic expression of our aspirations and emotions. These fantastic tales of bodies come from the deepest regions of the human psyche. Ancient Greeks, for example, believed that the uterus wandered around inside a woman's body—an “animal within an animal.” If a woman sniffed an unpleasant odor, the uterus would retreat. Organized “digestive excess” began with the eating and drinking contests of antiquity and continues through the hot-dog eating competitions of today. And the “libido-podalic association,” connecting male sexuality and the foot, insinuated itself into mainstream medicine in the sixteenth century; meanwhile, the feet of women in some cultures were scrupulously kept from view. Gonzalez-Crussi shows that the many imaginary representations of the body are very much a part of our corporeality.

Jokha Alharthi re-appraises the relationship between love, poetry and Arab society in the 8th to 11th centuries. She avoids clichés about the purity of love in'Udhri poetry, instead questioning the traditional emphasis on chastity and the assumption that this poetry omits any concept of the body.

The body has become central to practices of self-tracking. By focusing on the relations between quantification, the body, and labor, this volume sheds light on the ways in which discourses on data collection and versions of the ›corporate self‹ are instrumental in redefining concepts of labor, including notions of immaterial and free labor in an increasingly virtual work environment. The contributions explore the functions of quantification in conceptualizing the body as a laboring body and examine how quantification contributes to disciplining the body. By doing so, they also inquire how practices of self-tracking, self-monitoring, and self-optimization have evolved historically.

Writers in Brazil and Mexico discovered early on that speculative fiction provides an ideal platform for addressing the complex issues of modernity, yet the study of speculative fictions rarely strays from the United States and England. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the present. The book portrays the effects—and ravages—of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body. In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway examines all these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives, most importantly through the lens of Bolívar Echeverría's “baroque ethos,” which emphasizes the strategies that subaltern populations may adopt in order to survive and prosper in the face of massive historical and structural disadvantages. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is developed in discussion with Roberto Esposito's concept of immunity and Giorgio Agamben's distinction between “political life” and “bare life.” This book will be of interest to scholars of speculative fiction, as well as Mexicanists and Brazilianists in history, literary studies, and critical theory.

This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew's body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women's writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.

In the past decades, developments in the fields of medicine, new media, and biotechnologies challenged many representations and practices, questioning the understanding of our corporeal limits. Using concrete examples from literary fiction, media studies, philosophy, performance arts, and social sciences, this collection underlines how bodily models and transformations, thought until recently to be only fictional products, have become a part of our reality. The essays provide a spectrum of perspectives on how the body emerges as a transitional environment between fictional and factual elements, a process understood as faction.

The nineteenth century saw a marked change in how Americans viewed and understood the human form. These new ways of understanding the body reflect how Americans were beginning to see the body's constituent parts as interconnected. From the transcendentalists'idealized concept of self to the rise of Darwinian theory after the Civil War, the era and its writers redefined the human body as both deeply reactive and malleable. Josh Doty explores antebellum American conceptions of bioplasticity—the body's ability to react and change from interior and exterior forces—and argues that literature helped to shape the cultural reception of these ideas. These new ways of thinking about the body's responsiveness to its surroundings enabled exercise fanatics, cold-water bathers, cookbook authors, and everyday readers to understand the tractable body as a way to reform the United States at the physiological level. Doty weaves together analysis of religious texts, nutritional guides, and canonical literature to show the fluid relationship among bodies, literature, and culture in nineteenth-century America.

John Hughes explores Hardy's claim that his art sought to intensify the expression of things through three main sections on music, the body, and voice. These offer intersecting and mutually informing discussions of the central drama of inexpression and expressivity in Hardys work, as it affects the various personae of the text, including the reader. Throughout, the book draws on themes in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell to reveal how Hardys fiction and poetry express and represent the affective and physical conditions of mind, and their conflicts with social fictions of identity. The first main section on music incorporates three chapters that examine how Hardys writing stages musical experience as an expression of human desire and individuality at odds with the constraints of rationality, Victorian fiction form, and social convention. Intricate and extensive readings are linked also to larger contextual and theoretical issues in order to show how music as a theme and motif highlights the kinds of creativity and ethical cruxes that characterise Hardys work throughout his career. The second section on embodiment and sensation shows how close attention to Hardys writing on the topics of facial and bodily expression (and affectivity) reveal much about the sources of his inspiration, and its philosophical conditions and implications. The third section on voice offers three chapters, each of which centrally employs a close metrical reading of an important Hardy poem within its larger biographical and inter-textual contexts. These readings demonstrate how fundamental were Hardys innovations in meter to the power and originality of his work, and to its expressive treatment of his abiding preoccupations with love, grief, childhood, and the loss of faith.