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Reading the Body in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (review)

At first glance, the title of Juliet McMaster's new book seems to proclaim allegiance to a vast and growing field of contemporary scholarship. In the last decades, numerous researchers and critics have attempted to "read" the human body that is, to seek meaning in the myriad ways it has been understood, theorized, experienced and imagined over history. Eighteenth-century studies, their literary branch included, have shared this fascination; the result has been an impressive series of books, articles and dissertations devoted to the question of the body. The richness of this ongoing debate is perhaps best reflected in collections such as Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. von MÃ1⁄4cke's Body & Text in the Eighteenth Century (1994) or in the articles on the eighteenth century included in Angela Keane and Avril Horner's Body Matters (2000). The body's place in the writing of particular authors has also been studied in depth for example, in Carol Houlihan Flynn's The Body in Swift and Defoe (1990) and in Tristanne J. Connolly's William Blake and the Body (2002). All of these works can be said to share the goal of "reading" the eighteenth-century body, although they vary in their methodological approach to it and examine it in a wide range of contexts.