ENGLISH

Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses

By William A. Cohen

Book information

Publisher
Univ Of Minnesota Press
Year
2008
ISBN
0816650128, 9780816650125, 0816650136, 9780816650132
LCC
PR468.S43 C65 2008
Open Library ID
OL17010630M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
711 kB (728409 bytes)
Pages
200\200
Topic
Literature Literary
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

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

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