Livia Arndal Woods “I feel that, instead of the past, it is the future that haunts us now.” – Future Home of the Living God This fall, I’ve shared a series of posts here on a literary tradition that centers the reproductive body. This is a tradition, I argue, that marks literature of…
Tag: gothic
The Reproductive Sublime in Anthropocenic Literature, Part II: Theorizing a Reproductive Sublime
Livia Arndal Woods Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful defines the sublime as “whatever is in any sort terrible…[and] productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (34). The particular strength of this emotion is the result of the sublime’s…
Menopause: The Female Mummy’s Curse
Fig. The Opening of the Tomb of Nitocris by Darius (?) – René-Antoine Houasse circa 1686 Daisy Butcher The nineteenth century’s fascination with Egypt reached its apogee in the Mummy novel—from Jane Webb Loudon’s 1827 The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, the first book to feature a reanimated Egyptian mummy, to Bram…
The Reproductive Sublime in Anthropocenic Literature, Part I: The Frankenstein Bicentennial
Livia Arndal Woods Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) has a big birthday on the horizon, a whole host of celebrations are afoot to mark the occasion, and this is the second Medical Health and Humanities blog post in as many weeks to take the novel as its subject. This hubbub reflects not only the perennial popularity…