Corporeality, power relations and contamination in eighteenth-century British culture
Corporeality, power relations and contamination in eighteenth-century British culture

Author(s): Ana Maria Tolomei
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Sociology, Comparative Study of Literature, Culture and social structure , Studies in violence and power
Published by: Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploieşti
Keywords: contamination; power relations; epidemic; corporeality; recuperation;
Summary/Abstract: The purpose of the book "Corporeality, Power Relations and Contamination in Eighteenth-Century British Culture" is to reconsider and show how corporeality by which I mean various ways in which bodies are organized can reshape the physical but most importantly the non-physical body in critical circumstances. Recuperation and rejuvenation attempts of obsolete values, de-construction, re-construction or re-creation of the body under the siege of a contaminant will to power or the obsessive need of de-contamination are some of the organizing and organizational systems analyzed in this book. Two of the main chapters of this book deal with common grounds and border transgression techniques in and of literary and medical discourses of epidemic and endemic disease like plague, smallpox or gout, with physician and non-physician writers focusing on the 18th century British culture. A skillful conjunction between the two leads to a high degree of textual and contextual synchronicity at the verbal, metaphoric level, and at the non-verbal level of physiological and psychological communication which are intensively and extensively analyzed in this book. This work is intended to be a social, political, moral and spiritual pre-reading, reading and re-reading of the body as text having in mind the assumption that body and consequently disease are culturally and historically determined or pre-determined when referring to previous uses of the body in its various manifestations.

• Details
• Contents