Body Language: Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel [Paperback]

Body Languageexamines the complex intersections of British eighteenth-century comic fiction and medical discourse. By engaging medical writings of renowned and widely-read physicians of the Enlightenment such as John Freind, Thomas Sydenham, Albrecht von Haller, John Whytt, and William Cullen, with novels of humor by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox, Alves explains how medicine shaped comic language by dramatizing female-specific phenomena like menstruation, hysteria, nervous disorders, and pregnancy. In these novels, the medical belief that women are incapable of bodily self-regulation becomes an imperative for policing women’s bodies and highlights the enduring shortcomings of patriarchal systems. Ultimately, these comic representations offer a counternarrative of women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood, exposing masculine anxieties about the effectiveness of marriage to regulate women’s sexuality.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Body Languageexamines how eighteenth-century medical discourse informed the comic novel. Through comic representations of “leaky” female physical, psychological, and emotional embodiment, novels by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox engage political and social anxieties caused by women’s sexuality.KATHLEEN TAMAYO ALVES is an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College of The City University of New York. Her research centers on eighteenth-century literature and culture, medicine, and literary history, and she has recently published inStudies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction,Eighteenth-Century Studies,andThe Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
 

Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Medicine and Comic Representations of Women 1
1 Leaky Writings and Leaky Bodies in