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RR 2016/227 The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature Edited by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2015 xiii + 273 pp. ISBN 978 1 107 04809 6 (hbck); ISBN 978 1 107 64439 7 (pbck); ISBN 978 1 316 30911 7 (e-book) £49.99 $89.99 (hbck); £17.99 $27.99 (pbck); $22 (e-book) Cambridge Companions to Literature
We live our lives as embodied creatures. The way we understand the body is very much the same way we understand ourselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the bodily creation of the human being is presented as the culmination of the deity's work, beautifully captured by the poetic prose of the King James's translation of the Bible: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth" (The Bible, Genesis. 1: 27-28).
Birth, death, life, illness, love, hatred, pain and joy are all embodied experiences. And, as Rotschild's (2002) book on trauma poetically declares through its title, The Body Remembers . The centrality of the body in the human experience is therefore very much inescapable. And yet, over the centuries, the role and value of the body have been contested, argued upon, even denied. At various times in history, the body has become a physical and metaphorical space to be conquered, controlled, vanquished or even denied. It comes as no surprise that literature - one of the prime sites for the exploration of what it means to be human - should concern itself with the body too.
The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (CCBL ) brings together, under the skilful editorship of David Hillman and Ulrika Maude, 16 contributions by as many scholars to trace, with references to the wider cultural and even scientific contexts, the representation of the body in literature. This variety of perspectives should not surprise us because, as the volume's editors point out (p. 2), "[c]ontemporary approaches to the body [...]...