Monstrosities: Bodies and British RomanticismU of Minnesota Press, 2003 - 224 Seiten A surprising evaluation of the role of the physical body in the construction of British identity. Eighteenth-century medicine used the word "monstrosities" to describe physically deformed bodies--those irreducible to the "proper body" in their singular, sometimes startling difference. Considering British society in confrontation with such monstrosities, Paul Youngquist reveals the cultural politics of embodiment in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the histories of medicine, economics, liberalism, and nationalism, his work shows that bodies are not simply born but rather built by cultural practices directed toward particular social ends. Among the phenomena Youngquist treats are the science of comparative anatomy, the annual festivity of Bartholomew Fair, the social status of black Britons, opium habitues, pregnant women, and wounded war veterans. The authors he engages include John Locke, William Blake, Olaudah Equiano, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley. Uniquely interdisciplinary, formidably researched, and replete with curious illustrations, this remarkable book should be of interest to anyone concerned with the historical and cultural fate of bodies in liberal society--and with the importance of deviance in determining that fate. |
Inhalt
Building Bodies | 3 |
Troubling Measures | 28 |
Possessing Beauty | 57 |
Bad Habits | 89 |
Crazy Body | 109 |
Mother Flesh | 129 |
Imperial Legs | 161 |
Notes | 191 |
Works Cited | 201 |
217 | |
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abject aesthetics affirms agency anatomist anatomy Anglesey Bartholomew Fair beauty becomes Blake bodily British Briton Byron Cambridge Camper civil society cognition Coleridge Coleridge's cultural norm deformity describes deviant flesh deviation difference Dionysian discourse effects eighteenth century England Equiano excitement face female body Figure force Foucault Frankenstein function habit human Hunter incarnate individual John John Hunter Kant Kant's knowledge Kubla Khan labor late eighteenth liberal feminism liberal political liberal society living London Mary Wollstonecraft material matter measure medicine monster monstrosities moral mother flesh Museum narrative national identity natural Nietzsche norm of embodiment normal obstetric operation opium pain patriotic philosophy physical physician physiology placenta poetry possession practices produce proper body prosthesis Quincey Quincey's relations Reynolds Romantic Romanticism Samuel Taylor Coleridge sense sexual contract Sheldrake singular social Surgeons tion transcendental turns University Press uterus vital Waterloo William William Hunter Wollstonecraft women Wordsworth wounds