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One of the most exciting developments in recent literary studies bases interpretation on a new understanding of bodily aspects of text. Contributors Mary Carruthers, Michael Camille, Seth Lerer, and Carolyn Dinshaw bring various disciplinary perspectives to this intriguing subject.
The method employed here views the body as a text to be read. Though the approaches of these essays are widely varied, three concerns figure and refigure themselves throughout the book: the gendered body and the copied book as locus of pain, pleasure, and desire. They will be of immense interest to medievalists and other scholars of language, philosophy, history, art history, and gender studies.
Frese and O’Keeffe explore the liminal areas between the book and the body from contemporary perspectives. Though the approaches of these essays are widely varied, three concerns figure throughout the book: the gendered body and the copied book as locus of pain, pleasure, and desire.
“Four learned and distinguished medievalists pursue the metaphor of the body as book in densely argued essays.” —Ecclesiastical History
"Genuinely scholarly and compellingly of the moment, The Book and the Body sees four of the brightest new medievalist minds test and expand the interdicipliary possiblities. This well-conceived volume should stand as a model for the new kind of quick-response publishing in Medieval Studies." –David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Dolores Warwick Frese is Professor Emeritus of English and Fellow of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of An Ars Legendi for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1991), and coeditor of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation (1974).
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe is the Clyde and Evelyn Slusser Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the editor of Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon England (1994), and author of Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (1990)