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Literary Criticism General

Telling the Flesh

Life Writing, Citizenship, and the Body in the Letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot

by (author) Sonja Boon

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2015
Category
General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780773546394
    Publish Date
    Sep 2015
    List Price
    $43.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780773545762
    Publish Date
    Sep 2015
    List Price
    $115.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780773597419
    Publish Date
    Sep 2015
    List Price
    $100.00

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Description

In the second half of the eighteenth century, celebrated Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-1797) received over 1,200 medical consultation letters from across Europe and beyond. Written by individuals seeking respite from a range of ailments, these letters offer valuable insight into the nature of physical suffering.

Plaintive, desperate, querulous, fearful, frustrated, and sometimes arrogant and self-interested in tone, the letters to Tissot not only express the struggle of individuals to understand the body and its workings, but also reveal the close connections between embodiment and politics. Through the process of writing letters to describe their ailments, the correspondents created textual versions of themselves, articulating identities shaped by their physical experiences. Using these identities and experiences as examples, Sonja Boon argues that the complaints voiced in the letters were intimately linked to broader social and political discourses of citizenship in the late eighteenth century, a period beset with concerns about depopulation, moral depravity, and corporeal excess, and organized around intricate rules of propriety.

Contributing to the fields of literary criticism, history, gender and sexuality studies, and history of medicine, Telling the Flesh establishes a compelling argument about the connections between health, politics, and identity.

About the author

Sonja Boon is an award-winning writer, researcher and teacher. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Geist, The Ethnic Aisle and donttalktomeaboutlove.org, and is forthcoming in two edited collections. In 2018, she received the Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing from the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her critical memoir, titled What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home, will be published in September 2019 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Sonja Boon's profile page

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