The Anatomy Shelf Issue #12 (April 2022)
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CONTENTS:
CURRENT NEWS
NEW BOOKS:
Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle by Fraser Riddell
The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter - Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender edited by Carmen Dexl & Silvia Gerlsbeck
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo
The Wounded Body: Memory, Language and the Self from Petrarch to Shakespeare edited by Fabrizio Bondi, Massimo Stella & Andrea Torre
UPCOMING BOOKS:
A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse by Victoria Shepherd
The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story by Sam Knight
The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates by Robin Lane Fox
Frankenstein in Theory: A Critical Anatomy Edited by Prof Orrin N. C. Wang
FREE ONLINE EVENTS:
Virtual tour: The Venice island cemetery of San Michele
CALLS FOR PAPERS:
Gothic Pedagogies: teaching, learning, and the literatures of terror
Haunting Hibernia: Conjuring the Contemporary Irish Gothic conference
CURRENT NEWS
NEW BOOKS
Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle by Fraser Riddell (Cambridge University Press, 2022), ISBN 13: 9781108839204, Hardback, 250 pages, £75.00
This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Academic – Interdisciplinary – Literature – Music
Drawing on an ambitious range of interdisciplinary material, including literature, musical treatises and theoretical texts, Music and the Queer Body explores the central place music held for emergent queer identities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Canonical writers such as Walter Pater, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf are discussed alongside lesser-known figures such as John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee and Arthur Symons. Engaging with a number of historical case studies, Fraser Riddell pays particular attention to the significance of embodiment in queer musical subcultures and draws on contemporary queer theory and phenomenology to show how writers associate music with shameful, masochistic and anti-humanist subject positions. Ultimately, this study reveals how literary texts at the fin de siècle invest music with queer agency: to challenge or refuse essentialist identities, to facilitate re-conceptions of embodied subjectivity, and to present alternative sensory experiences of space and time. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Worked examples or Exercises.
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The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter - Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender edited by Carmen Dexl & Silvia Gerlsbeck, (Springer Nature Switzerland AG) ISBN: 9783030886035, 345 pages, Hardback, £17.99
Human bodies – Academic – Multidisciplinary – Representation
This international and multidisciplinary volume focuses on the male body and constructions of gender in a variety of cultural productions and formats. Locating the subject matter in relevant theoretical fields, it looks at representations of male bodies in various contexts through paranoid and reparative lenses. Organized into four major sections, the contributions assembled in this book feature engaging readings of 'non/conforming bodies', 'fashionable bodies', 'passing bodies', and 'pioneering bodies' that to different degrees foreground their critical and creative potentials. In its full scope, the book acknowledges the plurality of gendered experiences and the diversity of male bodies. The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter adds to Cultural Studies scholarship interested in the body and gender in general and contributes to the fields of Masculinity and Body Studies in particular.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-male-body-in-representation/carmen-dexl/silvia-gerlsbeck/9783030886035
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What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo, (Atlantic Books) ISBN: 9781911630944, 352 pages, Hardback, £18.99
Memoir – Trauma bodies – Non-Fiction – Narrative
Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know.
By the age of thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: she had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD - a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.
Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.
In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown in California to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma - but you can learn to move with it.
Powerful, enlightening and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body - and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/9781911630944
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The Wounded Body: Memory, Language and the Self from Petrarch to Shakespeare edited by Fabrizio Bondi, Massimo Stella & Andrea Torre, (Springer Nature Switzerland AG) ISBN: 9783030919030, 411 pages, Hardback, £109.99
Physical Bodies – Internal Bodies – Bodies in Motion – Exploration of Actions
This edited collection explores the image of the wound as a 'cultural symptom' and a literary-visual trope at the core of representations of a new concept of selfhood in Early Modern Italian and English cultures, as expressed in the two complementary poles of poetry and theatre. The semantic field of the wounded body concerns both the image of the wound as a traumatic event, which leaves a mark on someone's body and soul (and prompts one to investigate its causes and potential solutions), and the motif of the scar, which draws attention to the fact that time has passed and urges those who look at it to engage in an introspective and analytical process. By studying and describing the transmission of this metaphoric paradigm through the literary tradition, the contributors show how the image of the bodily wound-from Petrarch's representation of the Self to the overt crisis that affects the heroes and the poetic worlds created by Ariosto and Tasso, Spenser and Shakespeare-could respond to the emergence of Modernity as a new cultural feature.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-wounded-body/fabrizio-bondi/massimo-stella/9783030919030
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UPCOMING BOOKS:
A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse by Victoria Shepherd, (Oneworld Publications), ISBN: 9780861540914, 352 pages, Hardback, £16.99
Release date: 02/06/2022
Historical bodies – Traumatic bodies – Identification – Internal Exploration
'Fascinating and compassionate' Horatio Clare
The King of France - thinking he was made of glass - was terrified he might shatter...and he wasn't alone. After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France's asylums. Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead.
For centuries we've dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks - they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas.
In this ground-breaking history, Victoria Shepherd uncovers stories of delusions from medieval times to the present day and implores us to identify reason in apparent madness.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-history-of-delusions/victoria-shepherd/9780861540914
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The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story by Sam Knight, (Faber & Faber), 256 pages, ISBN: 9780571357567, Hardback, £14.99
Release date: 05/05/2022
Factual – Medical Humanities – Medical History – Investigative
A true story so outlandish and improbable that it simply demands to be read, Knight's page-turning volume spotlights a network of psychic visionaries working out of a run-down 1960's mental hospital and the extraordinary effects wrought by two young 'percipients' in particular.
Premonitions are impossible. But they come true all the time.
Most are innocent. You think of a forgotten friend. Out of the blue, they call. But what if you knew that something terrible was going to happen? A sudden flash, the words Charing Cross. Four days later, a packed express train comes off the rails outside the station. What if you could share your vision, and stop that train? Could these forebodings help the world to prevent disasters?
In 1966, John Barker, a dynamic psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate these questions. He would find a network of hundreds of correspondents, from bank clerks to ballet teachers. Among them were two unnervingly gifted 'percipients'. Together, the pair predicted plane crashes, assassinations and international incidents, with uncanny accuracy. And then, they informed Barker of their most disturbing premonition: that he was about to die.
The Premonitions Bureau is an enthralling true story, of madness and wonder, science and the supernatural - a journey to the most powerful and unsettling reaches of the human mind.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-premonitions-bureau/sam-knight/9780571357567
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The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates by Robin Lane Fox Penguin Books Ltd ISBN: 9780141983967, 432 pages, paperback, £14.99
Release date: 07/07/2022
Medical Humanities – Ancient History – Historical – Early modern history
Longlisted for the RUNCIMAN AWARD, 2021
Medicine is one of the great fields of achievement of the Ancient Greeks. Hippocrates is celebrated worldwide as the father of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath is admired throughout the medical profession as a founding statement of ethics and ideals. In the fifth century BC, Greeks even wrote of medicine as a newly discovered craft they had invented.
Robin Lane Fox's remarkable book puts their invention of medicine in a wider context, from the epic poems of Homer to the first doctors known to have been active in the Greek world. He examines what we do and do not know about Hippocrates and his Oath and the many writings that survive under his name. He then focuses on seven core texts which give the case histories of named individuals, showing that books 1 and 3 belong far earlier than previously recognised. Their re-dating has important consequences for the medical awareness of the great Greek dramatists and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Robin Lane Fox pieces together the doctor's thinking from his terse observations and relates it in a new way to the history of Greek prose and ideas.
This original and compelling book opens windows onto many other aspects of the classical world, from women's medicine to street-life, empire, art, sport, sex and even botany. It fills a dark decade in a new way and carries readers along an extraordinary journey form Homer's epics to the grateful heirs of the Greek case histories, first in the Islamic world and then in early modern Europe.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-invention-of-medicine/robin-lane-fox/9780141983967
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Frankenstein in Theory: A Critical Anatomy Edited by Prof Orrin N. C. Wang, (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc), ISBN: 9781501372209, 272 pages, Paperback, £28.99
Release date: 28/07/2022
Literature - Narrative – interdisciplinary – Theory
This collection provides new readings of Frankenstein from a myriad of established and burgeoning theoretical vantages including narrative theory, cognitive and affect theory, the new materialism, media theory, critical race theory, queer and gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and others. Demonstrating how the literary power of Frankenstein rests on its ability to theorize questions of mind, self, language, matter, and the socio-historic that also drive these critical approaches, this volume illustrates the ongoing intellectual richness found both in Mary Shelley's work and contemporary ways of thinking about it.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/frankenstein-in-theory/prof-orrin-n-c-wang/9781501372209
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FREE ONLINE EVENTS:
Virtual tour: The Venice island cemetery of San Michele
Fri, 29TH April 9:30 AM - 10:15 AM BST
A Virtual Tour of The Venice island cemetery of San Michele
About this event
A tour inside the largest cemetery of Venice opened during the French government. Many celebrities chose the island as their final resting place: we'll see the graves of the physicist Christian Doppler, the poets Ezra Pound and Josif Brodskij, the musicians Igor Stravinskij and Luigi Nono, the impresario Sergej Diaghilev. We'll finish the tour in the recent extension designed by the British architect David Chipperfield.
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CALLS FOR PAPERS:
Gothic Pedagogies: teaching, learning, and the literatures of terror
Abstracts due: 30th April 2022
14 July 2022, University of Birmingham
Keynote speakers: Professor Gina Wisker & Dr Ian Burrows
It has been a decade and a half since the last period of sustained work exploring the ways in which gothic literature is, and might be, taught in the classroom. This symposium seeks to renew this important critical discussion. It invites contributions that explore the richness, value, and complexities of pedagogy that situates the careful scrutiny of gothic literature at its heart.
Critical interest in the gothic remains high and the critical field is notable for the breadth of its scholarship; moreover, gothic literature courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level are enduringly popular choices for students, whether they are survey and introductory courses or bespoke Masters-level programmes, and the genre is a mainstay on UK secondary education curricula. But how might recent innovations in the critical field inform, and be informed by, innovations in the classroom? In order to explore this question more fully, we are motivated by several central concerns:
How do we teach gothic literature in the classroom?
What do gothic texts themselves have to say about learning and pedagogy?
How do we negotiate a genre that thrives on forms of affect – what Fred Botting calls the genre’s ‘negative aesthetics’ – that are, by and large, difficult to recapture in classroom environments, and difficult to evaluate cogently?
The gothic undoubtedly wants us to experience its thrills and chills. But it insists frequently on its own unspeakability and seems to prioritise individual susceptibility to its terrorising affect in ways that would suggest a shared experience of the gothic is an extremely difficult thing to recover. In what ways can something that wants quite deliberately to bypass rational thought be better understood via supposedly detached or objective small group discussions in secondary and higher education? How do we bring to light that which is secret and hidden, that which thrives only when briefly glimpsed?
Relatedly, there are questions to be asked here about responsible ways of teaching this literature, grappling as it does with subject matter that may be hoping to deliberately discomfort, shock, or offend its readers. We are interested, also, in what happens when the gothic does not succeed, and how far the gothic is in this respect indicative of broader issues when teaching genre literature. The classroom and lecture theatre might readily make space for the pleasures of reading lurid gothic texts. But what if the gothic text does not scare us (anymore)? If the gothic seeks above all to be experiential, hoping to stimulate certain sensations in its readers, in what ways do we make room in the classroom for our failure to experience something, for those moments when we did not “get it”?
We invite proposals for 15–20 minute papers and joint/collaborative presentations, 5 minute lightning talks, poster presentations, or any other relevant format that reflects on the questions above or any other issues pertaining to humanities pedagogy and the various literatures of terror and horror.
Please send an abstract of 200–300 words and a brief biography (100–150 words) to gothicpedagogies@gmail.com by 30th April 2022. Please also send any queries our way: we’d be glad to hear them.
We strongly encourage submissions from a range of teachers and students of the gothic, whether working or studying in secondary, further, higher or any other form of education.
More information: https://gothicpedagogy.wordpress.com/cfp/
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Haunting Hibernia: Conjuring the Contemporary Irish Gothic conference
Proposal Deadline: 1st May 2022
28th-29th October 2022
Carlow College, St. Patrick’s, Ireland (twitter: @CarlowCollege)
Abstracts to be sent to HauntingHibernia@gmail.com by 1st May 2022
See graphics below for information
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Thank you for reading this month’s issue of The Anatomy Shelf.
If you have anything you would like me to include in the next issue, please DM me on social media, email theanatomyshelf.gmail.com or message me on Substack by Monday 16th May to guarantee its inclusion.
Please also send me your submissions!
If you wish to submit to The Anatomy Shelf, please read the submission guidelines & contact information via the link below:
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Submission Guidelines
I am looking for written pieces, reviews, articles, short fiction, images, photography, art, and more, all related to the body in history, literature, and art, so please get in touch!
For more updates, please visit my social media:
Twitter: @gothicbookworm
Instagram: @gothicbookworm
Best wishes,
Lauren, The Gothic Bookworm