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  3. The Body in Swift and Defoe
  • Cited by 36
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      September 2009
      July 1990
      ISBN:
      9780511553462
      9780521382687
      9780521021654
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553462
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.475kg, 240 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.383kg, 240 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Literature, British History after 1450, English Literature 1700-1830
      Series:
      Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought (5)
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    Subjects:
    Literature, British History after 1450, English Literature 1700-1830
    Series:
    Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought (5)
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    Book description

    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

    "...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

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