Embodied

What does it mean to be human? British writers in the Victorian period found a surprising answer to this question. What is human, they discovered, is nothing more or less than the human body itself. In literature of the period, as well as in scientific writing and journalism, the notion of an interior human essence came to be identified with the material existence of the body. The organs of sensory perception were understood as crucial routes of exchange between the interior and the external worlds. Anatomizing Victorian ideas of the human, William A. Cohen considers the meaning of sensory encounters in works by writers including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rather than regarding the bodily exterior as the primary location in which identity categories-such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability-are expressed, he focuses on the interior experience of sensation, whereby these politics come to be felt. In these elegant engagements with literary works, cultural history, and critical theory, Cohen advances a phenomenological approach to embodiment, proposing that we encounter the world not through our minds or souls but through our senses "Remarkable, rare, and full of elegant, ineluctable insights, Embodied is unfailingly smart. Readers across many disciplines will grasp how the Victorians advanced ahead of postmodern dicta as they forged materialist thought, even when they talked in terms of mind and soul. An exquisite study." -Kathryn Bond Stockton, University of Utah "Victorian literature has seldom been more unsettlingly physical than it is in William Cohen's hands. A tour de force of cultural phenomenology, Cohen's Embodied shakes up our sense of the Victorians and so refreshes our senses themselves." -Joseph Litvak, Tufts University