In lively and accessible essays of literary criticism, this book approaches literature from classical times through the present with an emphasis on the place and treatment of the human body in the Western textual tradition. The work serves the double purpose of providing new, original, and provocative readings of familiar texts by applying the latest innovations in theory to specific works. Topics range from Sappho's fragments through cross-dressing in medieval romance to mutilation in Kathy Acker's Great Expectations. Together the essays illustrate changing definitions of bodily limits, integrity, transgression, sexuality, and violation in the history of the Western canon.
"Many have commented on the unusual appearance of modernist novels, but few have bothered to examine what part is played by the unusual typography, paginal arrangement, and binding in the works themselves. Examining Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Stein's Tender Buttons, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and William Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, Michael Kaufmann shows how these writers exposed the printed surface of their works and eventually made the print a part of the fiction itself." "Earlier English novels always presented themselves as printed artifacts - letters, diaries, logs - but by the nineteenth century, writers played down the physical form of the novel, positing the book as a space for tale-telling and not of reading. Print was simply the transparent medium that delivered the tale. In the twentieth century, modernist writers were aware that print had been subtly shaping language and consciousness, so they felt the necessity for exposing the printed page. To make readers aware of the print itself, modernists broke up the conventional arrangements of the page and the book." "Kaufmann shows the gradual opening of the "iconic space" of the novel from Faulkner and Stein to Joyce and Gass. Stein breaks with the conventional arrangement in Tender Buttons to split the husk of "meaning" that words had acquired through use. Her apparent nonsense turned out to be the only way she could find to make sense. Faulkner and Joyce employ a more conventional paginal arrangement, but bring their narratives into the space of the page. As I Lay Dying speaks itself, physically enacting the narrative. The enactment calls attention to the printed surface and shows the composed rows of interchangeable type comprising the narrative. In Finnegans Wake Joyce overuses the conventions of print until they become visible as conventions. Readers see fully the various textual spaces of the book - alphabetic, lexical, paginal, and compositional. More spectacularly, the paginal space becomes narratival space; the printed characters on the page are the fictional characters." "The final novel studied, Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, meditates on its fictions, especially the fictions of its physical form, its body. Gass uses the textual space of the novel with a thoroughness similar to Joyce's. The book, the wife, sounds a simultaneous delight and despair at the form that gives her the visible body of language but which also encloses her bodiless voice in a skin of print." "Recognizing the printed body of the modernist text as one of its defining features, argues Kaufmann, helps define high modernism, and identifies the modernist strain of some writers considered postmodernist."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In this volume an international team of scholars address the theme of books as sacred beings from an impressively diverse range of primary material and perspectives. Yet, as a group, they meld to engage and advance previous research to solidify the conclusion that human cultures, especially religious groups, often ritualize bodies as sacred books and books as divine beings. The studies collected here not only increase the range of examples of this phenomenon. They also show the wide variety of ways in which the identity of books, bodies and beings gets both ritualized and theorized. The articles are bracketed by an introduction to the collection, and then by a concluding essay that extrapolates the theme of books as sacred beings on a more general level.
This volume takes a critical discourse approach to the ways women's magazines contribute to the social construction of particular kinds of female body - as ideal, beautiful, ugly, overweight or engineered. Looking at the language used, it provides an insight into the experience of the female reader, and the likely impact upon her self-image.
Shortlisted for the 2021 BARS First Book Prize (British Association for Romantic Studies) The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
"This is an exciting exploration of the world of Buddhist attitudes towards religious texts, from Indian scriptures to Japanese medieval tales. Its emphasis on discursive strategies—how Buddhist texts function and what they expect of their readers/users (especially, the connection between books, their content, and their readers' bodies)—is a welcome new perspective."—Fabio Rambelli, author of Buddhist Materiality "Miracles of Book and Body is fluidly written and engaging. This book brings the reader to an awareness of the range and foci of medieval 'popular' readings of sutra literature, and Eubanks provides an important perspective to interpreting these narratives that is original and stimulating."—Thomas W. Hare, author of Zeami: Performance Notes "Charlotte Eubanks' sophisticated, insightful and readable study of the physicalities of sutra texts and sutra recitation makes sense of some of the strangest phenomena in medieval Japan. By disentangling the literal and metaphorical meanings in Buddhist setsuwa, Eubanks explains such things as how memorizing a text is an embodiment thereof, how texts can become sentient beings, and why the scroll is an appropriate format for recording dharma. Her work is both important and engaging."—Margaret H. Childs, University of Kansas "Drawing on an impressive range of Mahayana scriptures and medieval Japanese didactic tales, Eubanks unpacks recurrent tropes correlating text and flesh to reveal surprising connections among the literary, material, and ritual dimensions of Buddhist textual culture. Elegantly written and theoretically astute, this volume will be welcomed not only by specialists in Buddhist literature but also by readers interested in broader issues of text-based religious practice."—Jacqueline Stone, author of Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism
This volume contains a collection of the author’s life-long study (along with some new research written specifically for this book) of the text of 1-2 Kings, some of them translated into English for the first time. Julio Trebolle’s career has focused on the history of these biblical books from the triple angle of a combined textual, literary and source-compositional criticism. His usage of the Septuagint and its secondary versions like the Old Latin as a basis for the reconstruction of the history of the text is an invaluable contribution to the panorama of textual pluralism in the Bible during the Second Temple period which has emerged after the discoveries of the Dead Sea.
This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work. Informed by his "new historicist" understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman's poetry an
Aware of the act of writing as a temporal process, many modernist authors preserved numerous manuscripts of their works, which themselves thematized time. Textual Awareness analyzes the writing processes in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and relates these to Anglo-American, French, and German theories of text. By relating theory to practice, this comparative study reveals the links between literary and textual criticism. A key issue in both textual criticism and the so-called crisis of the novel is the tension between the finished and the unfinished. After a theoretical examination of the relationship between genetic and textual criticism, Dirk Van Hulle uses the three case studies to show how?at each stage in the writing process?the text still had the potential of becoming something entirely different; how and why these geneses proceeded the way they did; how Joyce, Proust, and Mann allowed contingencies to shape their work; how these authors recycled the words of their critics in order to inoculate their works against them; how they shaped an intertextual dimension through the processing of source texts and reading notes; and how text continually generated more text. Van Hulle's exploration of process sheds new light on the remarkable fact that so many modernist authors protected their manuscripts, implying both the authors' urge to grasp everything and their awareness of the dangers of their encyclopedic projects. Textual Awareness offers new insights into the artificiality of the artifact?the novel?that are relevant to the study of literary modernism in general and the study of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann in particular. Dirk Van Hulle is Assistant Professor of English and German Literature, University of Antwerp.
