Description
Book SynopsisTaking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature. Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite closure, containment and stoniness and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which female' porosity and manly' stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity. This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and feminine' genres, such as sloppy' letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.
Trade ReviewLennartz provides a fascinating, hyper-focused close re-reading of a host of canonical texts spanning roughly three hundred years ... [The book] pays unflinching attention to the liquid grotesque in the canon and provides an explicit treatment of the body and its leakiness without resorting to ‘metaphorical fig leaves’ or the stony limitations of chronology. * Literature & History *
Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Porous Bodies and the Discovery of Pores 3. Niobean Bodies in Romantic Times 4. Far from the Madding Romantic Crowd: The Anti-Porous Turn in the Victorian Age 5. (Re-)Liquefaction at the Dawn of the 20th Century 6. Niobean Aftermaths Bibliography Index
