Reading Breath in Literature

Arthur Rose is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Studies at Durham University, UK, where he is an affiliate of the Wellcome Trust Funded Life of Breath Project. Previous publications include Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee (2017) and, with Michael J. Kelly, Theories of History: History Read across the Humanities (2018)Stefanie Heine is a Postdoctoral Fellow (SNF Postdoc.Mobility) at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse. Virginia Woolf’s Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot’s Image (2014).Naya Tsentourou is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Exeter, Penryn. She is the author of Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion: Bodies at Prayer (2017) and has co-edited, with Lucia Nigri, Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England (2017).Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature and Co-Director of the Institute of Medical Humanities, Durham University.  Her publications include Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (2010) and (co-edited with Carolyne Larrington and Frank Brandsma) Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice (2015).Peter Garratt is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University.  His publications include Victorian Empiricism (2010) and The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (2016). A forthcoming volume, Distributed Cognition from Victorian Culture to Modernism, co-edited with Miranda Anderson and Mark Sprevak, will be published in late 2018.

• 1. Introduction: Reading Breath in Literature - Arthur Rose.- 2. The Play of Breath: Chaucer’s Narratives of Feeling - Corinne Saunders.- 3. Wasting Breath in Hamlet - Naya Tsentourou.- 4. Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee - Peter Garratt.- 5.Ebb and Flow: Breath-writing from Ancient Rhetoric to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg - Stefanie Heine.- 6. Combat Breathing in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh - Arthur Rose.