"The first approach can be called vertical since what is explored here is the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. The second approach covers the various junctures between the body's "outside" and "inside": it can therefore be called a "psychosomatic" approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of soul and the expression of emotions through the body's attitudes, and, on another level, the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain and death. Finally, the third approach ... brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions ..." - foreword Part 3.

"The first approach can be called vertical since what is explored here is the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. The second approach covers the various junctures between the body's "outside" and "inside": it can therefore be called a "psychosomatic" approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of soul and the expression of emotions through the body's attitudes, and, on another level, the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain and death. Finally, the third approach ... brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions ..." - foreword Part 3.

This is an imaginative evocation and analysis—through the medium of translations (the author’s own) of once popular but now forgotten literature—of the variety of “stories” in terms of which the Chinese have interpreted their lives since the early years of the 19th century.

The body is increasingly understood as being at the centre of colonial and post-colonial relationships and textual productions. Creating and circulating images of the undisciplined body of the 'other' was and is a critical aspect of colonialism. Likewise, resistance to colonial practices was also frequently corporeal, with indigenous peoples appropriating, parodying, and subverting those European practices which were used to signify the 'civilized' status of the colonizing body. The Body in the Library reads representations of the corporeal in texts of empire; case studies include: - gendered representations of corporeality - medical regimes - ethnography and photography in the Pacific - cultural transvestism in theatre - disease and colonial knowledge generation - 'freak shows' and colonial exhibits - cinematic representations of bodies - geography and the metaphorization of land as a penetrable body - marketing the body - organ transplants and the limits of the post-colonial paradigm In viewing colonialism and resistance as a bodily phenomenon, The Body in the Library enables new perspectives on the process of colonization and resistance. It is an important resource for teachers and students of colonial and post-colonial literatures.

Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism brings together scholars working in prehistoric, classical, medieval, and early modern studies who are developing, from longer and slower historical perspectives, critical post/humanisms that explore: 1) the significance (historical, sociocultural, psychic, etc.) of human expression and affectivity; 2) the impact of technology and new sciences on what it means to be a human self; 3) the importance of art and literature in defining and enacting human selves; 4) the importance of history in defining the human; 5) the artistic plasticity of the human; 6) the question of a human collectivity--what is the value, and peril, of "being human" or "being post/human" together?; and finally, 7) the constructive, and destructive, relations (aesthetic, historical, and philosophical) of the human to the nonhuman. This volume, edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy, insists on the always provisional and contingent formations of the human, and of various humanisms, over time, while also aiming to demonstrate the different ways these formations emerge (and also disappear) in different times and places, from the most ancient past to the most contemporary present. The essays are offered as "fragments" because the authors do not believe there can ever be a "total history" of either the human or the post/human as they play themselves out in differing historical contexts. At the same time, the volume as a whole argues that defining what "the human" (or "post/human") is has always been an ongoing, never finished cultural project.