Contemporary Literature and the Body

As with all of Hall’s writing, there is a delightful activism running throughout this important book. She raises the bar on critical discussion, bringing a new alertness to the relevance of the body in literature. Tellingly, she does not overlook how literary texts themselves are kinds of bodies not to be left out in the rush to theory and critical debate * Paul Crawford, Institute of Mental Health, University of Nottingham, UK * This book provides an expansive overview of the many and complex ways the body has featured in literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. The contributors engage large and important themes: gender, sexuality, disability, race, affect, ageing, the environment, and issues around the ‘digital’ body. This is important reading for students of literature, cultural history, body studies, and the medical humanities * Corinna Wagner, University of Exeter, UK * A timely introduction to key aspects of how literature deals with bodies. Each chapter is focused and backs its presentation of state-of-the-art theory with readings of literary works. Together they add up to an excellent background for understanding the centrality of the body, whether it is seen through the lens of gender, affect, race, disability, aging, or the posthuman * Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University, Denmark * Each essay in this comprehensive anthology critically articulates a partial account of embodied experience that co-constitute literature and the body. ... [T]he collection illuminates the ‘power of the margins’ ... and shows how different forms of situated embodied experiences can affect and be affected by different forms of discourses and texts. * The British Society for Literature and Science *