Body Language by Kathleen Tamayo Alves - 9781684485710

Body LanguageMedicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel\nAuthor(s): Kathleen Tamayo Alves\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Bucknell University Press,U.S., United States\nImprint: Bucknell University Press,U.S.\nISBN-13: 9781684485710, 978-1684485710\nSynopsis\nBody Language examines 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 womens bodies and highlights the enduring shortcomings of patriarch.