Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine
Title | Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine PDF eBook |
Author | Charis Charalampous |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 180 |
Release | 2015-08-20 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317584201 |
This book explores a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent cognitive agent, with desires, appetites, and understandings independent of the mind. It considers the works of early modern physicians, thinkers, and literary writers who explored the phenomenon of the independent and intelligent body. Charalampous rethinks the origin of dualism that is commonly associated with Descartes, uncovering hitherto unknown lines of reception regarding a form of dualism that understands the body as capable of performing complicated forms of cognition independently of the mind. The study examines the consequences of this way of thinking about the body for contemporary philosophy, theology, and medicine, opening up new vistas of thought against which to reassess perceptions of what literature can be thought and felt to do. Sifting and assessing this evidence sheds new light on a range of historical and literary issues relating to the treatment, perception, and representation of the human body. This book examines the notion of the thinking body across a wide range of genres, topics, and authors, including Montaigne’s Essays, Spenser’s allegorical poetry, Donne’s metaphysical poetry, tragic dramaturgy, Shakespeare, and Milton’s epic poetry and shorter poems. It will be essential for those studying early modern literature, cognition, and the body.
The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature
Title | The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Deanna Smid |
Publisher | BRILL |
Total Pages | 218 |
Release | 2017-08-28 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9004344047 |
Deanna Smid presents a literary, historical account of imagination in early modern English literature, particularly imagination’s effects on the body and on women, its restraint by reason, and its ability to create novelty.
Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England
Title | Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England PDF eBook |
Author | Alice Equestri |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 228 |
Release | 2021-08-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1000424995 |
Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended ‘irrationality’ entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others’ perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools? Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools’ characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.
Rethinking the Body in South Asian Traditions
Title | Rethinking the Body in South Asian Traditions PDF eBook |
Author | Diana Dimitrova |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 109 |
Release | 2020-12-14 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1000257959 |
This book analyses cultural questions related to representations of the body in South Asian traditions, human perceptions and attitudes toward the body in religious and cultural contexts, as well as the processes of interpreting notions of the body in religious and literary texts. Utilising an interdisciplinary perspective by means of textual study and ideological analysis, anthropological analysis, and phenomenological analysis, the book explores both insider- and outsider perspectives and issues related to the body from the 2nd century CE up to the present-day. Chapters assess various aspects of the body including processes of embodiment and questions of mythologizing the divine body and othering the human body, as revealed in the literatures and cultures of South Asia. The book analyses notions of mythologizing and "othering" of the body as a powerful ideological discourse, which empowers or marginalizes at all levels of the human condition. Offering a deep insight into the study of religion and issues of the body in South Asian literature, religion and culture, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian studies, South Asian religions, South Asian literatures, cultural studies, philosophy and comparative literature.
Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance
Title | Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance PDF eBook |
Author | Marsha S. Collins |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 323 |
Release | 2016-03-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317478843 |
From Theocritus’ Idylls to James Cameron’s Avatar, Arcadia remains an enduring presence in world culture and a persistent source of creative inspiration. Why does Arcadia still exercise such a powerful pull on the imagination? This book responds by arguing that in sixteenth-century Europe, a dramatic shift took place in imagining Arcadia. The traditional visions of Arcadia collided and fused with romance, the new experimental form of prose fiction, producing a hybrid, dynamic world of change and transformation. Emphasizing matters of fictional function and world-making over generic classification, Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance analyzes the role of romance as a catalyst in remaking Arcadia in five, canonical sixteenth-century texts: Sannazaro’s Arcadia; Montemayor’s La Diana; Cervantes’ La Galatea; Sidney’s Arcadia; and Lope de Vega’s Arcadia. Collins’ analyses of the re-imagined Arcadia in these works elucidate the interplay between timely incursions into the fictional world and the timelessness of art, highlighting issues of freedom, identity formation, subjectivity and self-fashioning, the intersection of public and private activity, and the fascination with mortality. This book addresses the under-representation of Spanish literature in Early Modern literary histories, especially regarding the rich Spanish contribution to the pastoral and to idealizing fiction in the West. Companion chapters on Cervantes and Sidney add to the growing field of Anglo-Spanish comparative literary studies, while the book’s comparative and transnational approach extends discussion of the pastoral beyond the boundaries of national literary traditions. This book’s innovative approach to these fictional worlds sheds new light on Arcadia’s enduring presence in the collective imagination today.
Shakespeare Survey 71: Volume 71
Title | Shakespeare Survey 71: Volume 71 PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Holland |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 978 |
Release | 2018-10-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 110858487X |
The 71st in the annual series of volumes devoted to Shakespeare study and production. The articles, like those of volume 70, are drawn from the World Shakespeare Congress, held 400 years after Shakespeare's death, in July/August 2016 in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The theme is 'Re-Creating Shakespeare'.
Histories of Emotion
Title | Histories of Emotion PDF eBook |
Author | Rüdiger Schnell |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Total Pages | 359 |
Release | 2020-11-23 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 3110692570 |
This study addresses two desiderata of historical emotion research: reflecting on the interdependence of textual functions and the representation of emotions, and acknowledging the interdependence of studies on the premodern and modern periods in the history of emotion. Contemporary research on the history of emotion is characterised by a proliferation of studies on very different eras, authors, themes, texts, and aspects. The enthusiasm and confidence with which situations, actions, and interactions involving emotions in history are discovered, however, has led to overly direct attempts to access the represented objects (emotions/feelings/affects); as a result, too little attention has been paid to the conditions and functions of their representations. That is why this study engages with the emotion research of historians from an unashamedly philological perspective. Such an approach provides, among other things, insights into the varied, often contradictory, observations that can be made about the history of emotion in modernity and premodernity.