| Author |
Vaught, Jennifer C. |
| Year |
2010 |
| Publisher |
Farnham: Ashgate |
| Number of pages |
243 |
| ISBN |
9780754697121 |
| Keywords |
|
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
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.
