The hurt(ful) body : performing and beholding pain, 1600-1800 / edited by Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven, Karel Vanhaesebrouck.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Macsotay, Tomas, editor.

Haven, Kornee van der, editor.

Vanhaesebrouck, Karel, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pain in the performing arts.

Performing arts--History--17th century.

Performing arts.

Performing arts--History--18th century.

Pain in literature.

Literature, Modern--17th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Literature, Modern--18th century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 311 pages) : illustrations (black and white); digital file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press, 2017.

Language Note:

Text in English.

System Details:

data file

Summary:

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. Part I of the book discusses, inter alia, the different forms of how suffering was staged, how that staging anticipated certain affects of the onlooker. The focus is on early modern French tragedy and how theatre chose to represent violence, the shocking events of infanticide, and the representation of the enslaved body, where suffering and exoticism go hand in hand. Part II deals with the question of how the availability (both physically and conceptually) of a beholder affects the pain of a victim. It reaffirms the role that words that stand in for pain can have in consolidating the harrowing experience of watching 'King Lear'. It explores the motif of the captivating power of the woman's gaze as part of a wider discourse of male anxiety, and deals with the issue of a (neo-) Epicurean image criticism. The case of Irish Rebellion is used to discuss several forms of witnessing horror, pain and torture in the context of religious and colonial massacres. Part III of the book discusses the executions of Palermo and the role pain played in stock trade discourses in the early modern Dutch Republic. The different forms of punishment at stake, whether in a theatrical or a dramatic scene, imply modes of subjection that were deeply coloured theologically.

Contents:

Spectacle and martyrdom : bloody suffering, performed suffering and recited suffering in French tragedy (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) / Christian Biet

The massacre of the innocents : infanticide and solace in the seventeenth-century Low Countries / Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt

To travel to suffer : towards a reverse anthropology of the early modern colonial body / Karel Vanhaesbrouck

'I feel your pain' : some reflections on the (literary) perception of pain / Jonathan Sawday

Masochism and the female gaze / John Yamamoto-Wilson

Epicurean tastes : towards a French eighteenth-century criticm of the image of pain / Tomas Macsotay

Wounding realities and 'painful excitements' : real sympathy, the imitation of suffering and the visual arts after Burke's sublime / Aris Sarafianos

Forced witnessing of pain and horror in the context of colonial and religious massacres : the case of Irish Rebellion, 1641-53 / Nicolás Kwiatkowski

Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty : subjection through representation or praxis / Frans-Willem Korsten

Palermo's past public executions and their lingering / Maria Pia Di Bella

The economics of pain : pain in Dutch stock trade discourses and practices, 1600-1750 / Inger Leemans.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 27 Mar 2026).

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-5261-1352-X

1-5261-2824-1

1-5261-1351-1

OCLC:

1039164665