Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780754669487)

Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health " physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.

Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
ISBN-10: 0754669483
ISBN-13: 9780754669487
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 11/28/2010
Pages: 260
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 06/01/2011 pg. 191