Patricia A. Gwóźdź – författare

With an interdisciplinary systematic approach scholars from different research fields of the humanities explore the historical and theoretical constellations between vulnerability, pregnant bodies, motherhood and mothering, this book traces the interrelation between the vulnerability and mothering bodies chronologically from ancient times to the modern world revealing the epistemological and aesthetic paths that create vulnerable mothering bodies throughout the ages.This book aims to discuss historical turning points, interruptions and transitions to explain how vulnerability was attributed to mothering in various cultural and historical contexts. It explores the connection between the vulnerability of pregnant bodies and motherhood, from the emergence of the term' vulnerability' in late antiquity to the latest 21st-century social and political discourses. Taking current developments in Motherhood Studies specifically into account, our contributors rethink the vulnerability of pregnant bodies, motherhood, and mothering from diverse disciplinary angles, including Ancient History and Religious Studies, Art History, Feminist Studies, Medical Humanities, History of Medicine, Legal Studies, and Literary and Cultural Studies.The case studies will be accompanied by a conversation with midwifery scholars exploring pressing questions on the front lines of maternal health, addressing the challenges pregnant individuals face today. It presents insights into the current challenges of supporting and caring for pregnant people in particularly vulnerable living conditions.

Figures emerge from movement. We live and think in figures. This monograph pursues the literary, theological, and philosophical traces of the concept of figura in comparative constellations from antiquity to modernity, starting with Erich Auerbach, developing them into a method of literary-philosophical figuralogy and opening up a compendium of connections between conceptual history and literary theory.

From the nineteenth century to the present, literary entanglements between Latin America and East Central Europe have been socio-politically and culturally diverse, but never random. The Iron Curtain, in particular, forced both regions to negotiate transatlantic «elective affinities», to take a stance in relation to the West, and to position themselves within world literature. As a result, the intellectual fields and creative productions of these regions have critically engaged with notions such as «post-imperial», «marginal», or «peripheral». In this edited volume, scholars from Germany, Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain cross the globe from South to East and back to uncover transcultural and transareal convivialities. Their papers explore literary history, poetics, intellectual networks, and aesthetic theory, while discussing new key concepts in global literary history.