by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (2005)
"This collection brings menstruation into the new feminist history of the body. From Aristotle to twentieth-century gynaecological texts, the chapters analyse the ways in which menstruation has been understood inside and beyond Western culture. The twenty studies examine how mythical and scientific knowledges of the body work to produce popular notions about femaleness. They chart the ways in which the historical alteration of menstruation - from magical act through sign of lesser maleness, polluting spiritual weakness, index of sexed being, hygienic calamity, act of consumer flow, to pathological deficiency - has influenced and reflected our relationship with this most ideologically-laden form of blood. They reveal how many cultures and historical periods have pivoted notions of health and sexed identity on ideas about menstruation and expose that, through our cultural texts, we are talking about menstruation all the time."--Jacket.
Peter N. Stearns
Examining sexuality in the past, and exploring how it helps explain sexuality in the present, this work uses a chronological structure to focus on major patterns and changes in sexuality in the main periods of world history, with comparison and discussion across cultures and societies.
David Collings
According to David Collings, Wordsworth interpreted the outbreak of war between England and France in 1793 as a cataclysmic event, one whose utterly disfiguring effect he would trace in his work over the next decade. Expanding upon this extravagant interpretation of events, Collings argues, Wordsworth constructed a poetics of cultural dismemberment - a way for culture to imagine that it survives in the midst of its own destruction. In Wordsworthian Errancies, Collings challenges prevailing critical approaches to Romantic poetry by describing and critiquing this deconstructive account of culture in Wordsworth's poetry. Drawing ideas from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and queer theory, Collings's reading reveals a radically new Wordsworth, one who is far more concerned with various "queer" modes of sexuality than previously suspected. In a provocative reading of The Prelude, for example, Collings argues that Wordsworth associated his poetic power with homoerotic masochistic fantasies and with his involuntary delight in traumatic events. He also redefines the debate concerning the politics of Wordsworth's poetry: disputing recent critics who claim that Wordsworth retreated from history into a poetry of the self, Collings argues instead that the very notion of the solitary, autobiographical subject derived from Wordsworth's sense of cultural trauma. The suspect dimension of Wordsworth's poetry, Collings concludes, is not its retreat from history but rather its claim that history is disaster.
James Reese
In this prequel to "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" set in 1870s Paris during the Prussian siege, an orphaned sixteen-year-old girl whose knowledge of witchcraft includes transformation spells meets a young medical doctor from London.
K.S. Singh, Birendranath Datta
Papers presented at a seminar organized by Anthropological Survey of India in collaboration with the Department of Folklore Research, Gawahati University with special reference to North-east India.