The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool English Texts and Studies): 72

Description

Contrary to what Simone de Beauvoir famously argued in 1949, men have not lived without knowing the burdens of their sex. Though men may have been elevated to cultural positions of strength and privilege, it has not been without intense scrutiny of their biological functions. Investigations of male potency and the `ability to perform' have long been mainstays of social, political, and artistic discourse and have often provoked spirited and partisan declarations on what it means to be a man. This interdisciplinary collection considers the tensions that have developed between the historical privilege often ascribed to the male and the vulnerabilities to which his body is prone. Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea's introduction illustrates how with the dawn of modern medicine during the Renaissance there emerged a complex set of languages for describing the male body not only as a symbol of strength, but as flesh and bone prone to illness, injury and dysfunction. Using a variety of historical and literary approaches, the essays that follow consider the critical ways in which medicine's interactions with literature reveal vital clues about the ways sex, gender, and identity are constructed through treatments of a range of `pathologies' including deformity, venereal disease, injury, nervousness, and sexual difference. The relationships between male medicine and ideals of potency and masculinity are searchingly explored through a broad range of sources including African American slave fictions, southern gothic, early modern poetry, Victorian literature, and the Modern novel. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Part One: Enquiry and Experimentation 1. The Poetics of Anatomy: John Donne's Dissection of the Male Body 2. The Black Male Body in Early African American Science Fiction: The Experimental Case of Sutton Grigg's Imperium in Imperio 3. Miserrimus Dexter: Monstrous Forms of the Fin de Siècle 4. ‘Intellectual suicides’: The Man of Letters in Middlemarch Part Two: Wounded and Psychopathologised Bodies 5. The Male Wound in Fin-de-Siècle Poetry 6. The Cacophony of Disaster: The Metaphorical Body of Sound in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man 7. ‘Human Nature is Remorseless’: Masculinity, Medical Science and Nervous Conditions in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway 8. ‘A man must make himself’: Hypochondria in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui Part Three: Fear, Confusion and Contagion 9. 'Sons of Belial': Contaminated/Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies 10. Syphilis and Sociability: The Impolite Bodies of Two Gentlemen, James Boswell (1740–1795) and Sylas Neville (1741–1840) 11. ‘’Tis My Father’s Fault’: Tristram Shandy and Paternal Imagination 12. Southern Gothic and the Queer Male Body Index