Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage

Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage

Paster, Gail Kern

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 022621382X
ISBN13: 9780226213828
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Sep 23 2014
Pages: 290
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.64 Width: 6.11 Depth: 8.99
Language: English
Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism--blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm--early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience.

Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

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