Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more

Recommended product

Popular links

Popular links


The Body in Swift and Defoe

The Body in Swift and Defoe

The Body in Swift and Defoe

Carol Houlihan Flynn
November 2005
Available
Paperback
9780521021654

    This original book takes a new look at problems surrounding the physical, material nature of the human body, in particular as represented in the works of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. It examines the role that literary invention (with its rhetorical and linguistic strategies) plays in expressing and exploring the problems of physicality, and deals with issues such as sexuality, cannibalism, scatology and the fear of contagion. Swift and Defoe are seen as writers confronting the essentially modern problem of what it is to be human in a rapidly developing consumer economy, where individual bodies, beset by poverty and disease, are felt to be threatened by the enveloping masses of urban crowds. In an eclectic synthesis of recent approaches, Carol Flynn works into her study the insights provided by biographical and psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism and social history, studies of eighteenth-century philosophy, and feminist readings. Her challenging approach reviews the cost of being human, the 'expense' of material as opposed to spiritual life in eighteenth-century society, as it is revealed in its literature.

    Reviews & endorsements

    "...Flynn is at her very best as cultural and literary critic: she enters eighteenth-century conflicts and shows us how they provide a social context for a wide body of literary and cultural texts." Carol Barash, Eighteenth-Century Studies

    See more reviews

    Product details

    November 2005
    Paperback
    9780521021654
    240 pages
    229 × 152 × 14 mm
    0.383kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: literary remains: the body as matter for text
    • 1. Dull organs: the matter of the body in the plague year
    • 2. The burthen in the belly
    • 3. Consuming desires: Defoe's sexual systems
    • 4. Flesh and blood: Swift's sexual strategies
    • 5. The ladies: d--ned, insolent, proud, unmannerly sluts
    • 6. Chains of consumption: the bodies of the poor
    • 7. Consumptive fictions: cannibalism in Defoe and Swift
    • Afterword: … suppose me dead
    • and then suppose …
    • Notes.
      Author
    • Carol Houlihan Flynn