The Body Embarrassed : : Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England / / Gail Kern Paster.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Paster, Gail Kern,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©1993
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.) :; 12 halftones

Men and women in early modern Europe experienced their bodies very differently from the ways in which contemporary men and women do. In this challenging and innovative book, Gail Kern Pasterexamines representations of the body in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama in the light of humoral medical theory, tracing the connections between the history of the visible social body and the history of the subject's body as experienced from within.Focusing on specific bodily functions and on changes in the forms of embarrassment associated with them, Paster extends the insights of such critics and theorists as Mikhail Bakhtin, Norbert Elias, and Thomas Laqueur. She first surveys comic depictions of incontinent women as "leaky vessels" requiring patriarchal management and then considers the relation between medical bloodletting practices and the gender implications of blood symbolism. Next she relates the practice of purging to the theme of shame and assays ideas about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing in medical and other nonliterary texts. Paster then turns to the use of reproductive processes in the plot structures of key Shakespeare plays and in Dekker's, Ford's, and Rowley's Witch of Edmonton.Including twelve vivid illustrations, The Body Embarrassed will be fascinating reading for students and scholars in the fields of Renaissance studies, gender studies, literary theory, the history of drama, andcultural history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- NOTE ON TEXTS -- INTRODUCTION. Civilizing the Humoral Body -- 1. LEAKY VESSELS: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy -- 2. LAUDABLE BLOOD: Bleeding, Difference, and Humoral Embarrassment -- 3. COVERING His Ass: The Scatological Imperatives of Comedy -- 4. COMPLYING WITH THE Due: Narratives of Birth and the Reproduction of Shame -- 5. QUARRELING WITH THE DUG, or I AM GLAD You DID NOT NURSE HIM -- INDEX