Humoring the body : emotions and the Shakespearean stage / Gail Kern Paster.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Paster, Gail Kern.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Knowledge--Psychology.

Shakespeare, William.

Drama--Psychological aspects.

Drama.

Mind and body in literature.

Human body in literature.

Emotions in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (291 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism-blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm-early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience. Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Note on Citations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Roasted in Wrath and Fire: The Ecology of the Passions in Hamlet and Othello

Chapter 2. Love Will Have Heat: Shakespeare's Maidens and the Caloric Economy

Chapter 3. Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Other Passionate Animals: Reading Shakespeare's Psychological Materialism across the Species Barrier

Chapter 4. Belching Quarrels: Male Passions and the Problem of Individuation

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-259) and index.

ISBN:

9786612932878

9781282932876

128293287X

9780226648484

0226648486

OCLC:

692205232