Freshly Printed - allow 7 days lead
Couldn't load pickup availability
Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain
Enrique Fernandez (Author)
9781487556440
Paperback / softback, published 6 November 2023
288 pages, 12 b&w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.41 kg
‘This book is original for its analysis of anatomical research and its impact on literary production. The book will be of interest to scholars of early modern Spanish literature and culture as well as historians of science and medicine in Spain.’ ‘The book is well written and researched… Each chapter is an insightful reading of a group of texts.’
Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain brings the study of Europe’s “culture of dissection” to the Iberian peninsula, presenting a neglected episode in the development of the modern concept of the self. Enrique Fernandez explores the ways in which sixteenth and seventeenth-century anatomical research stimulated both a sense of interiority and a fear of that interior’s exposure and punishment by the early modern state. Examining works by Miguel de Cervantes, MarÍa de Zayas, Fray Luis de Granada, and Francisco de Quevedo, Fernandez highlights the existence of narratives in which the author creates a surrogate self on paper, then “dissects” it. He argues that these texts share a fearful awareness of having a complex inner self in a country where one’s interiority was under permanent threat of punitive exposure by the Inquisition or the state. A sophisticated analysis of literary, religious, and medical practice in early modern Spain, Fernandez’s work will interest scholars working on questions of early modern science, medicine, and body politics.
Introduction: Dissective Narratives 1. Dissection and Interiority: The Case of Spain 2. Fray Luis de Granada’s Ill-Fated Defence of the Inner Man 3. Quevedo and the Interiority of the Body Politic 4. Cervantes’ Mechanical Interiors and Zayas’ Female Anatomies Conclusion: Compliant Resistance