Overview
- Breath has, to date, received little attention as a literary device; an oversight that this book rectifies
- The transhistorical nature of this study is unique and allows for a more developed notion of breath as a transhistorical literary device
- Presents five different approaches to reading breath in various literary genres (drama, poetry, novels, criticism), in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
Buy print copy
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
About this book
This open access book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, Fin de Siècle Aesthetics, American Poetics and the Postcolonial Novel, this book offers the first transhistorical study of breath in literature. At the same time, it shows how the study of breath in literature can contribute to recent developments in the Medical Humanities.
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Arthur Rose is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Studies at Durham University, UK, where he is an affiliate of the Wellcome Trust Funded Life of Breath Project. Previous publications include Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee (2017) and, with Michael J. Kelly, Theories of History: History Read across the Humanities (2018)
Stefanie Heine is a Postdoctoral Fellow (SNF Postdoc.Mobility) at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse. Virginia Woolf’s Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot’s Image (2014).
Naya Tsentourou is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Exeter, Penryn. She is the author of Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion: Bodies at Prayer (2017) and has co-edited, with Lucia Nigri, Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England (2017).Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature and Co-Director of the Institute of Medical Humanities, Durham University. Her publications include Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (2010) and (co-edited with Carolyne Larrington and Frank Brandsma) Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice (2015).
Peter Garratt is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. His publications include Victorian Empiricism (2010) and The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (2016). A forthcoming volume, Distributed Cognition from Victorian Culture to Modernism, co-edited with Miranda Anderson and Mark Sprevak, will be published in late 2018.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Reading Breath in Literature
Authors: Arthur Rose, Stefanie Heine, Naya Tsentourou, Corinne Saunders, Peter Garratt
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-99947-0Published: 20 November 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-99948-7Published: 29 October 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 134
Topics: Fiction, Drama, Poetry and Poetics, Literary Theory