Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves

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Author :
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295990767
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (959 download)

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Book Synopsis Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves by : Eve Keller

Download or read book Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves written by Eve Keller and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves examines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. At a time when medical texts first appeared in English in large numbers and the first signs of modern medicine were emerging both in theory and in practice, medical discourse of the body was richly interwoven with cultural concerns. Through close readings of a wide range of English-language medical texts from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, from learned anatomies and works of observational embryology to popular books of physic and commercial midwifery manuals, Keller looks at the particular assumptions about bodies and selves that medical language inevitably enfolds. When wombs are described as "free" but nonetheless "bridled" to the bone; when sperm, first seen in the seventeenth century by the aid of the microscope, are imagined as minute "adventurers" seeking a safe spot to be "nursed": and when for the first time embryos are described as "freeborn," fully "independent" from the females who bear them, the rhetorical formulations of generating bodies seem clearly to implicate ideas about the gendered self. Keller shows how, in an age marked by social, intellectual, and political upheaval, early modern English medicine inscribes in the flesh and functioning of its generating bodies the manifold questions about gender, politics, and philosophy that together give rise to the modern Western liberal self - a historically constrained (and, Keller argues, a historically aberrant) notion of the self as individuated and autonomous, fully rational and thoroughly male. An engagingly written and interdisciplinary work that forges a critical nexus among medical history, cultural studies, and literary analysis, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves will interest scholars in early modern literary studies, feminist and cultural studies of the body and subjectivity, and the history of women's healthcare and reproductive rights.

From the Womb to the Body Politic

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Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN 13 : 0299289931
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (992 download)

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Book Synopsis From the Womb to the Body Politic by : Anna Kuxhausen

Download or read book From the Womb to the Body Politic written by Anna Kuxhausen and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Russia during the second half of the eighteenth century, a public conversation emerged that altered perceptions of pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Children began to be viewed as a national resource, and childbirth heralded new members of the body politic. The exclusively female world of mothers, midwives, and nannies came under the scrutiny of male physicians, state institutions, a host of zealous reformers, and even Empress Catherine the Great. Making innovative use of obstetrical manuals, belles lettres, children’s primers, and other primary documents from the era, Anna Kuxhausen draws together many discourses—medical, pedagogical, and political—to show the scope and audacity of new notions about childrearing. Reformers aimed to teach women to care for the bodies of pregnant mothers, infants, and children according to medical standards of the Enlightenment. Kuxhausen reveals both their optimism and their sometimes fatal blind spots in matters of implementation. In examining the implication of women in public, even political, roles as agents of state-building and the civilizing process, From the Womb to the Body Politic offers a nuanced, expanded view of the Enlightenment in Russia and the ways in which Russians imagined their nation while constructing notions of childhood.

Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3030169324
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature by : Lynn M. Maxwell

Download or read book Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature written by Lynn M. Maxwell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role of wax as an important conceptual material used to work out the nature and limits of the early modern human. By surveying the use of wax in early modern cultural spaces such as the stage and the artist’s studio and in literary and philosophical texts, including those by William Shakespeare, John Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, and Edmund Spenser, this book shows that wax is a flexible material employed to define, explore, and problematize a wide variety of early modern relations including the relationship of man and God, man and woman, mind and the world, and man and machine.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191019720
Total Pages : 816 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment by : Valerie Traub

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment written by Valerie Traub and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 42 of the most important scholars and writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

This Mortal Coil

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199793395
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis This Mortal Coil by : Fay Bound Alberti

Download or read book This Mortal Coil written by Fay Bound Alberti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hamlet's "mortal coil" - which eventually and inevitably we "shuffle off" when we enter the sleep of death, as he puts it - has never been static. Indeed how the human body and its component parts have been understood, individually and collectively, has shifted across time, shaped by culture, religion, and technology. In this probing and provocative new book, Fay Bound Alberti uses the global histories of medicine, pathology, and emotions to explore these changing notions. Each chapter uses a different focus - bones, skin, sexual organs, spine, tongue, heart - revealing how each body part connects to a peculiarly Western notion of expertise, one which appropriates one element from the others and ignores their interconnection. The themes examined in This Mortal Coil - the nature of identity, the relationship between the brain and the heart, and the gendering of our physical and emotional selves - are enduring ones, but perceptions of the "perfect body" or "perfect health" evolve constantly. Moving between the surface and what lies beneath, Alberti provides a rich and fascinating accounting of each part, shedding light on the role scientific developments - from medical care to plastic surgery to cloning - plays in how we look at ourselves. Written with insight and narrative verve, Alberti's provocative book reveals how the mortal coil can be unwound, and looked at as if for the first time"--

Trans Historical

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501759523
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Trans Historical by : Greta LaFleur

Download or read book Trans Historical written by Greta LaFleur and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives—literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139488015
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

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Book Synopsis Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England by : Tom MacFaul

Download or read book Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England written by Tom MacFaul and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming a father was the main way that an individual in the English Renaissance could be treated as a full member of the community. Yet patriarchal identity was by no means as secure as is often assumed: when poets invoke the idea of paternity in love poetry and other forms, they are therefore invoking all the anxieties that a culture with contradictory notions of sexuality imposed. This study takes these anxieties seriously, arguing that writers such as Sidney and Spenser deployed images of childbirth to harmonize public and private spheres, to develop a full sense of selfhood in their verse, and even to come to new accommodations between the sexes. Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson, in turn, saw the appeal of the older poets' aims, but resisted their more radical implications. The result is a fiercely personal yet publicly-committed poetry that wouldn't be seen again until the time of the Romantics.

Reading the Early Modern English Diary

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030423271
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (34 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading the Early Modern English Diary by : Miriam Nandi

Download or read book Reading the Early Modern English Diary written by Miriam Nandi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-02-27 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading the Early Modern Diary traces the historical genealogy, formal characteristics, and shifting cultural uses of the early modern English diary. It explores the possibilities and limitations the genre held for the self-expression of a writer at a time which considerably pre-dated the Romantic cult of the individual self. The book analyzes the connections between genre and self-articulation: How could the diary come to be associated with emotional self-expression given the tedium and repetitiveness of its early seventeenth-century ancestors? How did what were once mere lists of daily events evolve into narrative representations of inner emotions? What did it mean to write on a daily basis, when the proper use of time was a heavily contested issue? Reading the Early Modern Diary addresses these questions and develops new theoretical frameworks for discussing interiority and affect in early modern autobiographical texts.

Networks, Interconnection, Connectivity

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Publisher : Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3823379704
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (233 download)

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Book Synopsis Networks, Interconnection, Connectivity by : Ellen R. Welch

Download or read book Networks, Interconnection, Connectivity written by Ellen R. Welch and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The map we draw of seventeenth-century French literary and intellectual culture is usually a small one, centered on Paris and Versailles to reflect the consolidation of intellectual and artistic capital under absolutism. Yet this process of centrali-zation depended on the creation of strong infrastructures connecting France's seat of political and cultural power to the provinces and the rest of the world: an efficient postal system, Europe's largest network of foreign embassies, trade links stretching to Asia and the Americas. How might a focus on these networks – and on the agents, materials, concepts, and practices that constituted them – broaden our mental topo-graphy of seventeenth-century French culture? This question animated a rich discussion during the May 2014 conference of the North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, held at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The present volume represents a selec-tion of the contributions to the conference.

The Theater of Experiment

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190627263
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis The Theater of Experiment by : Al Coppola

Download or read book The Theater of Experiment written by Al Coppola and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance.

Shakespeare's Medical Language: A Dictionary

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472557506
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (725 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare's Medical Language: A Dictionary by : Sujata Iyengar

Download or read book Shakespeare's Medical Language: A Dictionary written by Sujata Iyengar and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physicians, readers and scholars have long been fascinated by Shakespeare's medical language and the presence of healers, wise women and surgeons in his work. This dictionary includes entries about ailments, medical concepts, cures and, taking into account recent critical work on the early modern body, bodily functions, parts, and pathologies in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Medical Language will provide a comprehensive guide for those needing to understand specific references in the plays, in particular, archaic diagnoses or therapies ('choleric', 'tub-fast') and words that have changed their meanings ('phlegmatic', 'urinal'); those who want to learn more about early modern medical concepts ('elements', 'humors'); and those who might have questions about the embodied experience of living in Shakespeare's England. Entries reveal what terms and concepts might mean in the context of Shakespeare's plays, and the significance that a particular disease, body part or function has in individual plays and the Shakespearean corpus at large.

Familial Forms

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611490103
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis Familial Forms by : Erin Murphy

Download or read book Familial Forms written by Erin Murphy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Familial Forms is the first full-length study to examine how literary writers engaged the politics of genealogy that helped define the "century of revolution." By demonstrating how conflicts over the family-state analogy intersected with the period's battles over succession, including: the ascent of James I, the execution of Charles I, disputes over the terms of the Interregnum government, the Restoration of Charles II, the Exclusion Crisis, the deposition of James II, the ascent of William and Mary, and Anne's failure to produce a surviving heir, this study provides a new map of the seventeenth-century politics of family in England. Beginning with a reconsideration of Jacobean patriarchalism, Familial Forms focuses on the work of John Milton,Lucy Hutchinson, John Dryden, and Mary Astell. From their contrasting political and gendered positions, these authors contemplated and contested the relevance of marriage and kinship to government. Their writing illuminates two crucial elements of England's conflicts. First, the formal qualities of poems and prose tracts reveal that not only was there a competition among different versions of the family-state analogy, but also a competition over its very status as an analogy. Second, through their negotiations of linear and nonlinear forms, Milton, Hutchinson, Dryden, and Astell demonstrate the centrality of temporality to the period's political battles. Through close textual analysis of poetry, political tracts, parliamentary records, and nonliterary genealogies, Familial Forms offers a fresh understanding of the seventeenth-century politics of genealogy. It also provides new answers to long-standing critical questions about the poetic form of canonical works, such as Paradise Lost and Absalom and Achitophel, and illuminates the political significance of newly-canonical works by women writers, including Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeoreum, Hutchinson's Order and Disorder, and Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies.

Bits of Life

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Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295990333
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (959 download)

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Book Synopsis Bits of Life by : Anneke M. Smelik

Download or read book Bits of Life written by Anneke M. Smelik and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, the biological and technological have been fusing and merging in new ways, resulting in the loss of a clear distinction between the two. This entanglement of biology with technology isn't new, but the pervasiveness of that integration is staggering, as is the speed at which the two have been merging in recent decades. As this process permeates more of everyday life, the urgent necessity arises to rethink both biology and technology. Indeed, the human body can no longer be regarded either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole. Bits of Life assumes a posthuman definition of the body. It is grounded in questions about today's biocultures, which pertain neither to humanist bodily integrity nor to the anthropological assumption that human bodies are the only ones that matter. Editors Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke aid in mapping changes and transformations and in striking a middle road between the metaphor and the material. In exploring current reconfigurations of bodies and embodied subjects, the contributors pursue a technophilic, yet critical, path while articulating new and thoroughly appraised ethical standards.

The Emergence of Genetic Rationality

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Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295987502
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (959 download)

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Book Synopsis The Emergence of Genetic Rationality by : Phillip Thurtle

Download or read book The Emergence of Genetic Rationality written by Phillip Thurtle and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both the science of genetics and the practice of breeding plants or animals required extensive record keeping. The author claims that modern science was born when organizational systems (e.g., vertical files, standardized forms, and middle managers) were developed to manage and make sense of massive amounts of information. He argues that the introduction of such information processing forms, along with the cultural incentives for implementing them, sparked new ways of exploring how living forms were related to each other.

The Pulse of Modernism

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Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295805781
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (958 download)

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Book Synopsis The Pulse of Modernism by : Robert Michael Brain

Download or read book The Pulse of Modernism written by Robert Michael Brain and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

Two Rings

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Publisher : PublicAffairs
ISBN 13 : 1610391233
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Two Rings by : Millie Werber

Download or read book Two Rings written by Millie Werber and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judged only as a World War Two survivor's chronicle, Millie Werber's story would be remarkable enough. Born in central Poland in the town of Radom, she found herself trapped in the ghetto at the age of fourteen, a slave laborer in an armaments factory in the summer of 1942, transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, before being marched to a second armaments factory. She faced death many times; indeed she was certain that she would not survive. But she did. Many years later, when she began to share her past with Eve Keller, the two women rediscovered the world of the teenage girl Millie had been during the war. Most important, Millie revealed her most precious private memory: of a man to whom she was married for a few brief months. He was—if not the love of her life—her first great unconditional passion. He died, leaving Millie with a single photograph taken on their wedding day, and two rings of gold that affirm the presence of a great passion in the bleakest imaginable time.

Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000551911
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford by : Katarzyna Burzyńska

Download or read book Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford written by Katarzyna Burzyńska and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.