Book dossier

The body in parts

by David Hillman, Carla Mazzio, Carla Mazzio

The Body In Parts examines how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. Why did sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical, religious, and literary texts so often imagine the body part by part? What does this view of the human body tell us about social conceptions of part and whole, of individual and universal in the early modern period? As this provocative volume demonstrates, the symbolics of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. The Body In Parts presents work by some of the leading figures in Renaissance literature and culture: Nancy Vickers on corporeal fragments; Peter Stallybrass on the foot; Marjorie Garber on joints; Stephen Greenblatt on bodily marking and mutilation; Gail Kern Paster on the nervous system; Michael Schoenfeldt on the belly; Jeffrey Masten on the anus; Katharine Park on the clitoris; Kathryn Schwarz on the breast; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky on the eye; Katherine Rowe on the hands; Scott Stevens on the heart and brain; Carla Mazzio on the tongue; and David Hillman on the entrails.--