The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature

The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature
Author: David Hillman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2015-05-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107048095

This Companion offers the first systematic analysis of the body in literature, from the Middle Ages to the present day.

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
Author: Travis M. Foster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110889609X

The human body has been depicted in a variety of ways across a range of cultural and historical locations. It has been described, variously, as a biological entity, clothing for the soul, a site of cultural production, a psychosexual construct, and a material encumbrance. Each of these different approaches brings with it a range of anthropological, political, theological, and psychological discourses that explore and construct identities and subject positions. This Companion examines connections between American literature and bodies from the eighteenth century through the present. It reveals the singular way that literature can help us understand the body's entanglement within social and biological influences, and it traces the body's existence within histories of race, gender, and ability. This volume details the genres, critical fields, and interpretive practices that best facilitate the analysis of bodies in the full span of American literary imaginings.

Literature and the Body

Literature and the Body
Author: Elaine Scarry
Publisher: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1988
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Polemically set against the weightlessness of much recent discourse, this book explores the body as the ultimate testing ground for debates over language's ability to refer to the world.

Contemporary Literature and the Body

Contemporary Literature and the Body
Author: Alice Hall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2023-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350180173

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.

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature
Author: Andrew Mangham
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1846314720

Drawing on a range of texts from the seventeenth century to the present, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature explores accounts of motherhood, fertility, and clinical procedures for what they have to tell us about the development of women's medicine. The essays here offer nuanced historical analyses of subjects that have received little critical attention, including the relationship between gynecology and psychology and the influence of popular art forms on so-called women's science prior to the twenty-first century. Taken together, these essays offer a wealth of insight into the medical treatment of women and will appeal to scholars in gender studies, literature, and the history of medicine.

Bodies of the Text

Bodies of the Text
Author: Ellen W. Goellner
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780813521275

Dance and literary studies have traditionally been at odds: dancers and dance critics have understood academic analysis to be overly invested in the mind at the expense of body signification; literary critics and theorists have seen dance studies as anti-theoretical, even anti-intellectual. Bodies of the Text is the first book-length study of the interconnections between the two arts and the body of writing about them. The essays, by scholar-critics of dance and literature, explore dances actual and fictional to offer powerful new insights into issues of gender, race, ethnicity, popular culture, feminist aesthetics, historical "embodiment," identity politics, and narrativity. The general introduction traces the genealogy of dance studies in the academy to suggest why critical and theoretical attention to dance--and dance's challenges to writing--is both compelling and overdue. A milestone in interdisciplinary studies, Bodies of the Text opens both its fields to new inquiry, new theoretical precision, and to new readers and writers.

The Body

The Body
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0385539312

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A must-read owner’s manual for every body. Take a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body in this “delightful, anecdote-propelled read” (The Boston Globe) from the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything. With a new Afterword. “You will marvel at the brilliance and vast weirdness of your design." —The Washington Post Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body—how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Brysonesque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you in particular. As Bill Bryson writes, “We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.” The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information. As addictive as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best.

The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture

The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture
Author: Fionnuala Dillane
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-12-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319313886

This book elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilized in specifically Irish contexts across more than four hundred years of literature and culture. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed in this collection covers diverse cultural forms, from reports of battles and executions to stage and screen representations of sexual violence, produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how pain – whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediated – is culturally coded. Pain is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. This collection offers new paradigms for understanding Ireland’s literary and cultural history.

Body Language in Literature

Body Language in Literature
Author: Barbara Korte
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780802076564

An important interdisciplinary study, that establishes a general theory that accounts for the varieties of body language encountered in literary narrative, based on a general history of the phenomenon in the English language.