H2020Индивидуална стипендия2021–2023

INTRARIB · Intracorporeal Narratives: Reading Internal Biology in Women’s Literature, 1880s-1930s

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2021-09-01 → 2023-08-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 166 320 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Британската и американската женска литература от 1880-те до 1930-те години се анализира през описаниета на вътрешните органи, кръвта и нервната система. Това помага да се разбере как писателките са изразявали физическата си болка и са оспорвали представата, че тялото е само метафора.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Intracorporeal Narratives: Reading Internal Biology in Women’s Literature, 1880s-1930s

This project examined a selection of British and American women’s fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its depictions of internal anatomy: organs and systems, circulatory, nervous, reproductive, and digestive. Traditional scholarship tends to read mentions of the internal body and organs as purely symbolic and metaphorical, especially in women’s writing. My focus on corporeality in women’s fiction has demonstrated that running through it there is a profound concern with the medical body, a fascination with flesh, blood, and biological processes. The aim of the project was to demonstrate how an imaginative, descriptive approach to the internal body is used by women writers to communicate experiential illness, disorder and pain, and to claim ownership of corporeal experience. The objectives included investigating relationships, divergences and shared languages between literary and medical depictions over the period 1880s-1930s; investigating the nature and degree of assertions of ownership over the body through women’s depictions of the body’s internal anatomy and how this challenges critical narratives that see mentions of internal anatomy as exclusively metaphorical; examining the link between internal processes and mental health: the persistence of an organ-based understanding of psychological disorder, and how systems such as hormones and the microbiome are thought to impact the mind; centralising the body as a method of reading literary texts, to ask new questions about the body’s interior; considering how medical texts describe the body and its workings and how this plays into wider social narratives about gender. The project demonstrated the persistent desire to find a physiological rationale, to map pain internally, even when that pain has an emotional or psychological source. I also explored how changing conceptualisations of the body interact with gendered notions of pathology and disorder.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

My project examines British and American women’s fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its depictions of internal anatomy: organs and systems, circulatory, nervous, reproductive, and digestive. This study will make a distinctive contribution to the field of medical humanities: the development of an analytical process of body-centred reading, and new analysis of how women’s writing communicates bodily experiences and depicts the ‘intracorporeal’, narrative journeys through concealed and invisible organs. The project questions: how do visualisations of the body's insides and internal workings change through time? Does literature reflect medical developments and discoveries, for example echoing the shift from the nervous to the hormonal body? How are metaphors employed to aid us in visualising these systems and parts: the nervous system as a network of vibrating strings, hormones as postal packages or chemical messages, the sperm and egg as static and kinetic, the biological clock? My work surveys the persistent desire to find a physiological rationale, to map pain internally, even when that pain has an emotional or psychological source. I also explore how changing conceptualisations of the body interact with gendered notions of pathology and disorder. Comparing fictional texts to medical writing and advertising of the same era, I will track the development of and interaction between the medical understanding of the internal body, communication in the public realm, and exploration in literature.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

UNIVERSITEIT GENT · GentКоординаторБелгия