Tears, Liquids and Porous Bodies in Literature Across the Ages : Niobe’s Siblings

"Taking 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."--Publisher's website Cover Contents List of figures Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction 1 Porous bodies before (and after) the discovery of pores Ambivalent manly tears on the stage Niobean fountains Liquid masculinity: From dark Shakespeare to oozy Metaphysicals Utopian and dystopian floods – abdominal tears and drowning Quixotes Pornutopian halcyon days Drowning Don Juans – invitations to banquets of bulimia The Quixote’s disgust at Pandora’s box 2 Niobean bodies in the era of Romanticism Niobean sentimentalism Pamela’s effusions in the closet Porous Hommes and Femmes Machines: Fanny Hill Porous Gothic porn: The Monk Stony poetics versus porous effusions: Wordsworth and Coleridge Wordsworth’s anti-porous architecture Coleridge’s riotous fountains Niobean snakes, giants and monsters in Keats and Byron Keats’s alchemy of evaporation Tidal and porous ‘affairs’ in Byron’s poetry 3 Far from the madding Romantic crowd: The anti-porous turn in the Victorian age From body to stone: The myth of Pygmalion reloaded in Victorian fiction The sister as Pygmalion: Goblin Market Pygmalion and the genre of the Bildungsroman: Jane Eyre and David Copperfield Marital mausoleums, sepulchral beds and tragic masks in damp times The Gorgon in the Victorian marriage bed The mad and porous woman in the tomb The advent of the stony stoic A stoic in distress: Tess of the d’Urbervilles The failure of stoicism and dry Niobean convulsions: Jude the Obscure Vampiric agents of porosity The importance of being self-contained: Victorian dandies 4 (Re-)Liquefaction at the dawn of the twentieth century Rebirth of carnivalism in James Joyce’s Ulysses Modernist language as a laxative The descent into the porosity of death ‘After us the savage god’, or the explosion of the new porous women Porousness unleashed: Unsexing Bloom Re-enter Mrs Grundy: Lawrence’s rekindled puritanism Misogynist wrath Therapeutic porosity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Linguistic Pentecost or a new word-prudery? 5 Niobean reverberations in post-war literature Bibliography Index "Taking 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."-- Provided by publisher Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, 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 Preface -- 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