Body Language

Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel

AvKathleen Tamayo Alves

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

Del i serien Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

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Beskrivning

Body Language examines the complex intersections of British eighteenth-century comic fiction and medical discourse. By engaging medical writings of renowned and widely-read physicians of the Enlightenment such as John Freind, Thomas Sydenham, Albrecht von Haller, John Whytt, and William Cullen, with novels of humor by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox, Alves explains how medicine shaped comic language by dramatizing female-specific phenomena like menstruation, hysteria, nervous disorders, and pregnancy. In these novels, the medical belief that women are incapable of bodily self-regulation becomes an imperative for policing women’s bodies and highlights the enduring shortcomings of patriarchal systems. Ultimately, these comic representations offer a counternarrative of women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood, exposing masculine anxieties about the effectiveness of marriage to regulate women’s sexuality. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-11-11
Mått:156 x 235 x 11 mm
Vikt:454 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Antal sidor:200
Förlag:Bucknell University Press,U.S.
ISBN:9781684485703

Utforska kategorier

Medicinhistoria inom Medicin
Genusvetenskap inom Samhälle och politik
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur

Mer om författaren

Kathleen Tamayo Alves is an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College of The City University of New York. Her research centers on eighteenth-century literature and culture, medicine, and literary history, and she has recently published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Medicine and Comic Representations of Women 1. Leaky Writings and Leaky Bodies in Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771)2. Hysterical Language and Desiring Women in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749)3. The Maternal Body and Obstetric Authority in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) and Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751)4. Romantic (Mis)Readings and Nervous Sympathy in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752)Coda: Surgical Violence as a Tool of Masculine Dominance in Poor Things (2023)AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex