Allard, James Robert (Author)
University of Waterloo (Canada)
Wright, Julia M.
Edition Details: Advisor: Wright, Julia M.
Physical Details: 228 pp.
Language: English
This is a study of the complex signification of the body at the crux of literary Romanticism and the new institutionalization of medical discourse that focusses on selected writings by three figures: John Thelwall, John Keats, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Each of these figures received formal medical training exploring the materiality of existence, participated in a literary culture that celebrated the imaginative possibilities of that existence, and explicitly, of often apprehensively, addressed the problems manifested by their interconnections. Furthermore, each of these figures substantiates different aspects of the issues associated with the shifting position and treatment of the body in poetry, medicine, and the relation between the two. I explore their treatments of the interrelations between poetry and medicine that constitute and are constituted by contemporary notions---and the concomitant representations---of the body. Specifically, I theorize what I call body consciousness: on one hand, an awareness of oneself and others as physical, embodied beings (a consciousness of bodies), and, on the other hand, an awareness that such perception happens through the body (a bodily consciousness). The texts I examine here display a body consciousness resulting from the materialization (if through representation) of the medicalized body in the poetic text as part of a conscious struggle with the affinities and discrepancies generated by the interpenetration of medicine and poetry. Moreover, each text offers a figure I identify as the Poet- Physician who is at once the representation of the body at the intersection of poetry and medicine and a portrayal of the subject contending with that very intersection. In other words, the Poet-Physician substantiates two forms of hybridity---the medicalized body with the poetic body, and the writing subject struggling to choose between or unify medical and poetic aspirations---that both effect and are effected by the pervasive sense of body consciousness.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2003): 507. UMI order no. NQ77216.
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