Reading Breath in Literature

✍ Scribed by Arthur Rose, Stefanie Heine, Naya Tsentourou, Corinne Saunders, Peter Garratt

• Publisher: Springer International Publishing,Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 141
• Series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This open access book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, Fin de Siècle Aesthetics, American Poetics and the Postcolonial Novel, this book offers the first transhistorical study of breath in literature. At the same time, it shows how the study of breath in literature can contribute to recent developments in the Medical Humanities.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-x
Introduction: Reading Breath in Literature (Arthur Rose)....Pages 1-16
The Play of Breath: Chaucer’s Narratives of Feeling (Corinne Saunders)....Pages 17-38
Wasting Breath in Hamlet (Naya Tsentourou)....Pages 39-63
Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee (Peter Garratt)....Pages 65-89
Ebb and Flow: Breath-Writing from Ancient Rhetoric to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (Stefanie Heine)....Pages 91-112
Combat Breathing in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (Arthur Rose)....Pages 113-134

✦ Subjects

Literature; Fiction; Drama; Poetry and Poetics; Literary Theory