Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850)

Revealing Bodies Turns To The Eighteenth Century To Ask A Question With Continuing Relevance: What Kinds Of Knowledge Condition Our Understanding Of Our Own Bodies? Focusing On The Tension Between Particularity And Generality That Inheres In Intellectual Discourse About The Body, Revealing Bodies Explores The Disconnection Between The Body Understood As A General Form Available To Knowledge And The Body Experienced As Particularly One's Own. Erin Goss Locates This Division In Contemporary Bodily Exhibits, Such As Gunther Von Hagens' Body Worlds, And In Eighteenth-century Anatomical Discourse. Her Readings Of The Corporeal Aesthetics Of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, William Blake's Cosmological Depiction Of The Body's Origin In Such Works As The [first] Book Of Urizen, And Mary Tighe's Reflection On The Relation Between Love And The Soul In Psyche; Or, The Legend Of Love Demonstrate That The Idea Of The Body That Grounds Knowledge In An Understanding Of Anatomy Emerges Not As Fact But As Fiction. Ultimately, Revealing Bodies Describes How Thinkers In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries And Bodily Exhibitions In The Twentieth And Twenty-first Call Upon Allegorized Figurations Of The Body To Conceal The Absence Of Any Other Available Means To Understand That Which Is Uniquely Our Own: Our Existence As Bodies In The World.--publisher's Website. Naming The Body -- Bodies Without Bodies: Burke's Sublime Corporeality -- What Is Called Corporeal: Blake And The Body's Origin -- Bodies Of Meaning: Tighe And The Body's Apotheosis -- Conclusion: The Body As Allegory. Erin M. Goss. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Revealing Bodies considers three thinkers not often read together in order to ask a question with continued relevance in the present: how is it that we claim to know the body? Reading their work in relation to their contemporary anatomical discourse as well as our own contemporary anatomical spectacle, the book explores a question with wide-ranging stakes both for those with specialized interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century culture and with a broader interest in bodily representation CONTENTS 8 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 12 INTRODUCTION. Revealing Bodies 16 CHAPTER 1. NAMING THE BODY 32 CHAPTER 2. BODIES WITHOUT BODIES: Burke’s Corporeal Aesthetics 64 CHAPTER 3. WHAT IS CALLED CORPOREAL: Blake and the Body’s Origin 102 CHAPTER 4. BODIES OF MEANING: Tighe and the Body’s Apotheosis 134 CONCLUSION. The Body as Allegory 170 NOTES 182 WORKS CITED 218 INDEX 232 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 238