Flesh in the Age of Reason

Description:

"Starting with the grim Britain of the Civil War era, with its punishing sense of the body as a corrupt vessel for the soul, Roy Porter charts how, through figures as diverse as Locke, Swift, Johnson, and Gibbon, ideas about medicine, politics, and religion fundamentally changed notions of self. He shows how the Enlightenment (with its explosion or rational thinking and scientific invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) provided a lens through which we can best see the profound shift from the theocentric, otherwordly, Dark Ages to the modern, earthly, body-centered world we live in today. As man made in God's image gave way to the Enlightenment's notion of the Self-made man, the body moved center stage. Porter writes brilliantly on the ways in which men and women flaunted, decorated, tanned, and dieted themselves: activities that we find familiar but that a Puritan divine would have considered satanic. And he explores how, at the end of the century, the human soul took on a new significance in the works of Godwin, Blake, and Byron."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: Mind and body in literature,  Enlightenment,  English literature,  Rationalism in literature,  Intellectual life,  History and criticism,  Body, Human, in literature,  Human body in literature,  English literature, history and criticism, 18th century,  Great britain, intellectual life,  Body and soul in literature,  Medicine,  History,  Medical Sociology,  History, 18th Century,  Human Body,  Modern Literature,  Mind-Body Relations, Metaphysical,  Littérature anglaise,  Histoire et critique,  Corps humain dans la littérature,  Vie intellectuelle,  Siècle des Lumières,  Esprit et corps dans la littérature,  Rationalisme dans la littérature,  Médecine,  Histoire,  Geistesleben,  Lichamelijkheid,  Lichaam en ziel,  Zelf,  Verlichting (cultuurgeschiedenis),  Philosophy,  History, Early Modern 1451-1600,  Great britain, social conditions

Places: Great Britain

Times: 18th century