Robert A. Erickson – författare

A scholarly edition of a work by John Arbuthnot. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

In The Motion of the Heart and Blood (1653), William Harvey had set forth the scientific model of a phallic, generative organ pumping blood through a feminized body; in Paradise Lost, it is through the protracted rape and violation of Eve's heart that the Fall of Man occurs; nearly a century later Samuel Richardson's Clarissa would present a no less forceful but far more feminist and heroic narrative of the heart's power. Examining these other-and mostly English-literary, medical, religious, and philosophical texts, Erickson uncovers two ruling clusters of metaphors: one associating the heart with language, writing, and thought, the other with sex, passion, and gender. Charting the tension between the two, he offers a brilliant new reading of one of the central symbols in Western culture.