This Companion offers the first systematic analysis of the body in literature, from the Middle Ages to the present day.

The human body has been depicted in a variety of ways across a range of cultural and historical locations. It has been described, variously, as a biological entity, clothing for the soul, a site of cultural production, a psychosexual construct, and a material encumbrance. Each of these different approaches brings with it a range of anthropological, political, theological, and psychological discourses that explore and construct identities and subject positions. This Companion examines connections between American literature and bodies from the eighteenth century through the present. It reveals the singular way that literature can help us understand the body's entanglement within social and biological influences, and it traces the body's existence within histories of race, gender, and ability. This volume details the genres, critical fields, and interpretive practices that best facilitate the analysis of bodies in the full span of American literary imaginings.

This unique collection of essays, accompanied by videos, at last brings a dazzling view of the literary, social, and performative aspects of American Sign Language to a wide audience. The book presents the work of a renowned and diverse group of deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing scholars who examine original ASL poetry, narrative, and drama. The videos showcases the poems and narratives under discussion in their original form, providing access to them for hearing non-signers for the first time. Together, the book and videos provide new insight into the history, culture, and creative achievements of the deaf community while expanding the scope of the visual and performing arts, literary criticism, and comparative literature. The videos may be viewed online at ucpress.edu/go/signingthebodypoetic.

Dance and literary studies have traditionally been at odds: dancers and dance critics have understood academic analysis to be overly invested in the mind at the expense of body signification; literary critics and theorists have seen dance studies as anti-theoretical, even anti-intellectual. Bodies of the Text is the first book-length study of the interconnections between the two arts and the body of writing about them. The essays, by scholar-critics of dance and literature, explore dances actual and fictional to offer powerful new insights into issues of gender, race, ethnicity, popular culture, feminist aesthetics, historical "embodiment," identity politics, and narrativity. The general introduction traces the genealogy of dance studies in the academy to suggest why critical and theoretical attention to dance--and dance's challenges to writing--is both compelling and overdue. A milestone in interdisciplinary studies, Bodies of the Text opens both its fields to new inquiry, new theoretical precision, and to new readers and writers.

Sport literature is never just about sport. The genre’s potential to explore the human condition, including aspects of violence, gender, and the body, has sparked the interest of writers, readers, and scholars. Over the last decade, a proliferation of sport literature courses across the continent is evidence of the sophisticated and evolving body of work developing in this area. Writing the Body in Motion offers introductory essays on the most commonly taught Canadian sport literature texts. The contributions sketch the state of current scholarship, highlight recurring themes and patterns, and offer close readings of key works. Organized chronologically by source text, ranging from Shoeless Joe (1982) to Indian Horse (2012), the essays offer a variety of ways to read, consider, teach, and write about sport literature.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A must-read owner’s manual for every body. Take a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body in this “delightful, anecdote-propelled read” (The Boston Globe) from the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything. With a new Afterword. “You will marvel at the brilliance and vast weirdness of your design." —The Washington Post Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body—how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Brysonesque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you in particular. As Bill Bryson writes, “We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.” The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information. As addictive as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best.

Extraordinary Bodies is a cornerstone text of disability studies, establishing the field upon its publication in 1997. Framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, the book added depth to oppressive narratives and revealed novel, liberatory ones. Through her incisive readings of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson exposed the social forces driving representations of disability. She encouraged new ways of looking at texts and their depiction of the body and stretched the limits of what counted as a text, considering freak shows and other pop culture artifacts as reflections of community rites and fears. Garland-Thomson also elevated the status of African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Extraordinary Bodies laid the groundwork for an appreciation of disability culture and an inclusive new approach to the study of social marginalization.

Drawing on a range of texts from the seventeenth century to the present, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature explores accounts of motherhood, fertility, and clinical procedures for what they have to tell us about the development of women's medicine. The essays here offer nuanced historical analyses of subjects that have received little critical attention, including the relationship between gynecology and psychology and the influence of popular art forms on so-called women's science prior to the twenty-first century. Taken together, these essays offer a wealth of insight into the medical treatment of women and will appeal to scholars in gender studies, literature, and the history of medicine.

Body of Writing focuses on the traces that an author’s “body” leaves on a work of fiction. Drawing on the work of six important Spanish American writers of the twentieth century, René Prieto examines narratives that reflect—in differing yet ultimately complementary ways—the imprint of the author’s body, thereby disclosing insights about power, aggression, transgression, and eroticism. Healthy, invalid, lustful, and confined bodies—as portrayed by Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, Severo Sarduy, Rosario Castellanos, and Tununa Mercado—become evidence for Roland Barthes’s contention that works of fiction are “anagrams of the body.” Claiming that an author’s intentions can be uncovered by analyzing “the topography of a text,” Prieto pays particular attention not to the actions or plots of these writers’ fiction but rather to their settings and characterizations. In the belief that bodily traces left on the page reveal the motivating force behind a writer’s creative act, he explores such fictional themes as camouflage, deterioration, defilement, entrapment, and subordination. Along the way, Prieto reaches unexpected conclusions regarding topics that include the relationship of the female body to power, male and female transgressive impulses, and the connection between aggression, the idealization of women, and anal eroticism in men. This study of how authors’ longings and fears become embodied in literature will interest students and scholars of literary and psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies, and twentieth-century and Latin American literature.