Cordelia's can't: Rhetorics of reticence and (dis)ease in King Lear
Authors
Rees, Emma L. E.Affiliation
University of ChesterPublication Date
2010-12-01
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Susan Sontag in "Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors" points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, and though her analyses deals mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health - metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy - inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health-physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and, the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.Citation
In J. C. Vaught (Ed.), Rhetorics of bodily disease and health in medieval and early modern England (pp. 105-116). Farnham, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2010.Publisher
AshgateAdditional Links
http://www.ashgate.comType
Book chapterLanguage
enDescription
This book chapter is not available through ChesterRepSeries/Report no.
Literary and scientific cultures of early modernityISBN
9780754669487Sponsors
This book chapter was submitted to the RAE2014 for the University of Chester - English Language & Literature.Collections
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