Kill the body, the head will fall

Sample

Walter Vandereycken & Ron van Deth

With waiflike models dominating the advertising world and a new wave of feminists waging war on social pressure to be thin, eating disorders have, it seems, attained the status of a modern crisis. Although anorexia nervosa was not identified as such until the nineteenth century, the compulsion to be thin at the price of starvation has a long history in western society. Long before talk shows took over the air waves and Cosmopolitan hit the stands, obsession with body and fasting rituals plagued girls and women. But is anorexia as we know it today new? . In an engaging and thorough account of the history of self starvation in the western world, Walter Vandereycken and Ron Van Deth explore this question. Drawing on a myriad of intriguing examples, the authors show how self-inflicted starvation has changed its tone over the centuries and is inextricably enmeshed in socio-cultural contexts. Consider how drastically the meaning of fasting has mutated in the Christian western world: that in the twelfth century when divine miracles were accepted realities, an emaciated girl would have been seen as holy and touched by God. That same girl would have been considered possessed and cursed by Satan in the sixteenth century when popular belief in witches was on the rise. From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls traces the history of starvation from its religious roots, bound up in rigid asceticism, to its economic ties, in the form of living skeletons like "shadow Harry" who toured freak shows displaying his protruding ribs for money, to the Victorian era, where modern sexual and gender stereotypes find their origin. The book is a result of exhaustive research, covering Europe and the United States and spanning the early centuries of Christianity to the present day. From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls will interest readers in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, women's studies, religious and social history, and cultural studies.

Sample

Christopher G. White

"This book examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century American believers rejected older, often evangelical, theological traditions and turned to scientific psychologies to help them formulate new ideas about mind and spirit and new practices for spiritual growth. Christopher G. White looks in particular at how a group of liberal Protestants, including William James and G. Stanley Hall, turned away from traditional Christian orthodoxies and built a revised religious identity based on new psychological motifs and therapies. Whereas the conventional wisdom about these religious positions and abetted secularization. White points out that they did not minimize or obliterate belief but aided and reshaped it in unexpected ways. Unsettled Minds is the first book to explain the dramatic rise of new spiritualities of the mind, spiritualities that, but the early twentieth century, were turning eagerly to scientific and clinical psychological studies to reimagine religion and the problems of religious uncertainty."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Pushpa Naidu Parekh

Response to Failure provides a significant contribution to the existing body of literary scholarship on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, and Dylan Thomas. The author explored the texture of autobiographical experiences of "failure" that inform the poems and the poets' responses within the intellectual, cultural, religions, and political climates of their times. Unique comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches have been employed, including reader-response interpretation of the poems, as well as gender- and culture-centered theories of literary criticism and culture studies.

Sample

Wade E. Pickren & Alexandra Rutherford

"A History of Modern Psychology in Context presents the history of modern psychology in the richness of its many contexts. The authors resist the traditional storylines of great achievements by eminent people, or schools of thought that rise and fall in the wake of scientific progress. Instead, psychology is portrayed as a network of scientific and professional practices embedded in specific temporal, social, political, and cultural contexts. The narrative is informed by three key concepts - indigenization, reflexivity, and social constructionism - and by the fascinating interplay between disciplinary Psychology and everyday psychology." "The authors complicate the notion of who is at the center and who is at the periphery of the history of psychology by bringing in actors and events that are often overlooked in traditional accounts. They also highlight how the reflexive nature of Psychology - a science produced both by and about humans - accords history a prominent place in understanding the discipline and the theories it generates." "Throughout the text, the authors show how Psychology and psychologists are embedded in cultures that indelibly shape how the discipline is defined and practiced, the kind of knowledge it creates, and how this knowledge is received. The text also moves beyond an exclusive focus on the development of North American and European psychologies to explore the development of psychologies in other indigenous contexts, especially from the mid-20th-century onward."--BOOK JACKET.