Search results for ""Author Susan Wells""
Stanford University Press Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing
Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published by a mainstream press in 1973, is now in its eighth major edition. It has been translated into twenty-nine languages, has generated a number of related projects, and, with over four million copies sold, is as popular as ever. This study tells the story of the first two decades of the pioneering best-seller—a collectively produced guide to women's health—from its earliest, most experimental and revolutionary years, when it sought to construct a new, female public sphere, to its 1984 revision, when some of the problems it first posed were resolved and the book took the form it has held to this day.Wells undertakes a rhetorical and sociological analysis of the best-seller and of the work of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective that produced it. In the 1960s and 1970s, as social movements were on the rise and many women entered higher education, new writing practices came into existence. In the pages of Our Bodies, Ourselves, matters that had been private became public. Readers, encouraged to trust their own experiences, began to participate in a conversation about health and medicine. The writers of Our Bodies, Ourselves researched medical texts and presented them in colloquial language. Drafting and revising in groups, they invented new ways of organizing the task of writing. Above all, they presented medical information by telling stories. We learn here how these stories were organized, and how the writers drew readers into investigating both their own bodies and the global organization of medical care. Extensive archival research and interviews with the members of the authorial collective shed light on a grassroots undertaking that revolutionized the writing of health books and forever changed the relationship between health experts and ordinary women.
£23.39
Pennsylvania State University Press Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge
Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In Robert Burton’s Rhetoric, Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy, demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today.In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge.A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy, this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.
£68.36
Pennsylvania State University Press Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge
Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In Robert Burton’s Rhetoric, Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy, demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today.In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge.A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy, this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.
£27.95
