| Observations concerning our current cultural obsession and dis-ease with the body have become critical platitudes, from endless media banter about health and well-being, to the explosive growth of plastic surgery, to the phenomenon of addiction. But, no subject is more universal in our postmodern era than discussions of body size and image, with the super-slender, "anorexic" body a perennial marker of celebrity and esoteric beauty. This dissertation studies the anorexic body within new fields of knowledge, finding its roots in the more general concepts of bodily slenderness, vulnerability, pain, and nervous sensitivity that dominated the culture and literature of the eighteenth-century and what might be called the "long Romantic period.".;The pained and slender body reevaluates sensation by disrupting dichotomies and blurring boundaries between health, illness, mind, and body, operating through a negative, non-dialectical dynamic. This dissertation uses Theodor Adorno's notion of self-relinquishment and Bruno Latour's theory of hybridity to trace this dynamic, linking the concept of slenderness and its negative logic to the following concepts: what G. J. Barker-Benfield calls the eighteenth-century's "ambiguously susceptible nerves," Eliza Haywood's negative form of womanhood, William Blake's vision of contraries, John Keats' view of "negative capability," Percy Shelley's notion of embodied ethics, and the "undead" body of the vampire.;Most feminist critics associate this super-slender bodily ideal with a modern "anorexic" aesthetic and a legacy of mechanization that banish the female flesh in favor of a Cartesian ideal. By contrast, this study suggests that the slender body questions the very foundations of modernity by redefining bodily experience as more than an epistemological limit. The slender body is, in fact, a central image in discourses across history that challenge Enlightenment visions of progress---predicated on a dialectical, self-centric, and positivistic worldview---with counter-narratives of selflessness, relinquishment, and loss, defining identity not as a positive source of knowledge and authority but negatively as a potential site of weakness and dispossession. The Romantic, slender body registers this conflict between a modern biomedical emphasis on health versus a non-modern or even postmodern preoccupation with pain and suffering as conditions that give new meaning to material processes. |
