Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780816650132)

Making sense of the body in Victorian literature

What does it mean to be human? British writers in the Victorian period found a surprising answer to this question. What is human, they discovered, is nothing more or less than the human body itself. In literature of the period, as well as in scientific writing and journalism, the notion of an interior human essence came to be identified with the material existence of the body. The organs of sensory perception were understood as crucial routes of exchange between the interior and the external worlds.

Anatomizing Victorian ideas of the human, William A. Cohen considers the meaning of sensory encounters in works by writers including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront?, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rather than regarding the bodily exterior as the primary location in which identity categories--such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability--are expressed, he focuses on the interior experience of sensation, whereby these politics come to be felt.

In these elegant engagements with literary works, cultural history, and critical theory, Cohen advances a phenomenological approach to embodiment, proposing that we encounter the world not through our minds or souls but through our senses.

Author: William a. Cohen
ISBN-10: 0816650136
ISBN-13: 9780816650132
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Language: English
Published: 01/01/2009
Pages: 216
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.62lbs
Size: 9.03h x 6.26w x 0.48d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2009
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2009 pg. 275