Blood cries out : negotiating embodiment and otherness in the premodern world
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Maggie S. Kelly (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Jennifer Feather
Abstract: My dissertation focuses on medieval and early modern literary uses of blood symbolism to describe and represent these marginalized groups: Christ, women, Jews, and disabled persons. My key argument is that blood is the nexus at which competing rhetorics of otherness converge—it both connects and complicates these discourses; blood becomes the locus of social and bodily rhetorics of marginalization because of its complex and fluid nature. Blood can be used both to include and exclude various groups of people. While I will cover numerous discourses of otherness, my key focus here will be religious and medical rhetorics. During the medieval and early modern periods, we see a burgeoning shift from religious to medical discussions of embodiment, especially as they relate to marginalized groups, and the use of blood symbolism appears in both of these rhetorics. It is not my intention to argue that medical rhetoric outright replaces/displaces religious rhetorics of the body, but rather that cultural ideas about blood in particular allow society to shift between—and merge—these two discourses, and many others, more fluidly. While the meanings of blood abound, a similar vein runs through them all: the presence of blood—either literal or metaphorical—coats whatever it touches with a stratum of gravity. Hundreds of years after humoral theory has been discredited and abandoned, complex and paradoxical beliefs about blood still remain. Why, of the four humors, are we still talking about blood? Why do we still ascribe cultural and personal value to this bodily fluid? In my dissertation, I turn to premodern writers to address these questions because blood symbolism is so heavily employed and encoded, and more importantly being redefined, in a number of literary texts during the medieval and early modern periods. Blood has remained a cultural fascination for centuries because it is rife with symbolic power, and premodern writers utilized this emblematic potential repeatedly in literary texts. More specifically, these writers often used blood rhetoric to demarcate and define marginalized groups of people. These others exist in a liminal social space, and the fluidity of blood’s symbolism enables these marginalized groups and individuals to occupy multiple identities and spaces simultaneously in the larger social mind. Blood is the nexus at which the social and physical converge, and blood symbolism allows cultural meaning to be transcribed onto (and within) the body. As Genesis notes, blood cries out, and in this case, it cries out for attention, and it cries out for definition.
Blood cries out : negotiating embodiment and otherness in the premodern world
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Created on 5/1/2023
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 2023
- Keywords
- Blood, Embodiment, Medieval, Otherness, Renaissance
- Subjects
- Literature, Medieval $x History and criticism
- Other (Philosophy) in literature
- Blood in literature