Humoring the Body

Humoring the Body PDF Author: Gail Kern Paster
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226648486
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience. Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

Humoring the Body

Humoring the Body PDF Author: Gail Kern Paster
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226648486
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience. Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare

The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare PDF Author: Gail Kern Paster
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Gail Kern Paster explores the role of the city in the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and Ben Jonson. Paster moves beyond the usual presentation of the city-country dichotomy to reveal a series of oppositions that operate within the city's walls. These oppositions—city of God and city of man, Jerusalem and Rome, bride of the Lamb and whore of Babylon, ideal and real—together create a dual image of the city as a visionary ideal society and as a predatory trap, founded in fratricide, shadowed in guilt. In the theater, this duality affects the fate of early modern city dwellers, who exemplify even as they are controlled by this contradictory reality.

Jane Austen and Comedy

Jane Austen and Comedy PDF Author: Erin Goss
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684480779
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Ultimately, Jane Austen and Comedy invites its reader to take seriously Austen's production of laughter and to keep laughing nonetheless.

Humoring Resistance

Humoring Resistance PDF Author: Dianna C. Niebylski
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791484955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Contextualizing theoretical debates about the political uses of gendered humor and female excess, this book explores bold new ways in which a number of contemporary Latin American women authors approach questions of identity and community. The author examines the connections among strategic uses of humor, women's bodies, and resistance in works of fiction by Laura Esquivel, Ana Lydia Vega, Luisa Valenzuela, Armonía Somers, and Alicia Borinsky. She shows how the interarticulation of the comic and comic-grotesque vision with different types of excessive female bodies can result in new configurations of female subjectivity.

Masculinity, Corporality and the English Stage, 1580-1635

Masculinity, Corporality and the English Stage, 1580-1635 PDF Author: Christian M. Billing
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754656517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Combining analysis of early modern anatomical science, social phenomena such as cross dressing, examples of proto-feminist cultural agency and close readings of English professional theatre texts, the author presents an original investigation into shifting dramatic representations of the sexed and gendered body, together with the ways in which early modern English professional playwrights used carefully-constructed versions of human corporality to inflect their interventions into the gender politics of the period.

Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England

Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England PDF Author: Mary Floyd-Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192594281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England gathers essays from prominent scholars of English Renaissance literature and history who have made substantial contributions to the study of early modern embodiment, historical phenomenology, affect, cognition, memory, and natural philosophy. It provides new interpretations of the geographic dimensions of early modern embodiment, emphasizing the transactional and dynamic aspects of the relationship between body and world. The geographies of embodiment encompass both cognitive processes and cosmic environments, and inner emotional states as well as affective landscapes. Rather than always being territorialized onto individual bodies, ideas about early modern embodiment are varied both in their scope and in terms of their representation. Reflecting this variety, this volume offers up a range of inquiries into how early modern writers accounted for the exchanges between the microcosm and macrocosm. It engages with Gail Kern Paster's groundbreaking scholarship on embodiment, humoralism, the passions, and historical phenomenology throughout, and offers new readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Milton, and others. Contributions consider the epistemiologies of navigation and cartography, the significance of geohumoralism, the ethics of self-mastery, theories of early modern cosmology, the construction of place memory, and perceptions of an animate spirit world.

Bad Humor

Bad Humor PDF Author: Kimberly Anne Coles
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812298357
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Race, in the early modern period, is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. In Bad Humor, Kimberly Anne Coles charts how these concerns converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination. Coles delineates the process whereby religious error, first resident in the body, becomes marked on the skin. Early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in mutual influence. By the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul's condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, could be manifest in the humoral disposition of the physical body. The history that this book unfolds describes developments in natural philosophy in the early part of the sixteenth century that force a subsequent reconsideration of the interactions of body and soul and that bring medical theory and theological discourse into close, even inextricable, contact. With particular consideration to how these ideas are reflected in texts by Elizabeth Cary, John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, and others, Coles reveals how science and religion meet nascent capitalism and colonial endeavor to create a taxonomy of Christians in Black and White.

Histories of Emotion

Histories of Emotion PDF Author: Rüdiger Schnell
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110692570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
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.

Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture

Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Freya Sierhuis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317083474
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Bringing together scholars from literature and the history of ideas, Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture explores new ways of negotiating the boundaries between cognitive and bodily models of emotion, and between different versions of the will as active or passive. In the process, it juxtaposes the historical formation of such ideas with contemporary philosophical debates. It frames a dialogue between rhetoric and medicine, politics and religion, in order to examine the relationship between mind and body and between experience and the senses. Some chapters discuss literature, in studies of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton; other essays concentrate on philosophical arguments, both Aristotelian and Galenic models from antiquity, and new mechanistic formations in Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. A powerful sense of paradox emerges in treatments of the passions in the early modern period, also reflected in new literary and philosophical forms in which inwardness was displayed, analysed and studied”the autobiography, the essay, the soliloquy”genres which rewrite the formation of subjectivity. At the same time, the frame of reference moves outwards, from the world of interior states to encounter the passions on a public stage, thus reconnecting literary study with the history of political thought. In between the abstract theory of political ideas and the inward selves of literary history, lies a field of intersections waiting to be explored. The passions, like human nature itself, are infinitely variable, and provoke both literary experimentation and philosophical imagination. Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture thus makes new connections between embodiment, selfhood and the emotions in order to suggest both new models of the self and new models for interdisciplinary history.

Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance

Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance PDF Author: Amy Kenny
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030776182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance seeks to address the representation of the humors from non-traditional, abstract, and materialist perspectives, considering the humorality of everyday objects, activities, and performance within the early modern period. To uncover how humoralism shapes textual, material, and aesthetic encounters for contemporary subjects in a broader sense than previous studies have pursued, the project brings together three principal areas of investigation: how the humoral body was evoked and embodied within the space of the early modern stage; how the materiality of an object can be understood as constructed within humoral discourse; and how individuals’ activities and pursuits can connote specific practices informed by humoralism. Across the book, contributors explore how diverse media and cultural practices are informed by humoralism. As a whole, the collection investigates alternative humoralities in order to illuminate both early modern works of art as well as the cultural moments of their production.