Book
Ahead of Publication
Body Language
Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel
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Kathleen Tamayo Alves
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2026
About this book
Body Language examines the complex intersections of British eighteenth-century comic fiction and medical discourse. By engaging medical writings of renowned and widely-read physicians of the Enlightenment such as John Freind, Thomas Sydenham, Albrecht von Haller, John Whytt, and William Cullen, with novels of humor by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox, Alves explains how medicine shaped comic language by dramatizing female-specific phenomena like menstruation, hysteria, nervous disorders, and pregnancy. In these novels, the medical belief that women are incapable of bodily self-regulation becomes an imperative for policing women’s bodies and highlights the enduring shortcomings of patriarchal systems. Ultimately, these comic representations offer a counternarrative of women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood, exposing masculine anxieties about the effectiveness of marriage to regulate women’s sexuality.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Author / Editor information
KATHLEEN TAMAYO ALVES is an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College of The City University of New York. Her research centers on eighteenth-century literature and culture, medicine, and literary history, and she has recently published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
Reviews
"Body Language artfully weaves an interdisciplinary web of science, sexuality, and reading practices to reveal the feminist potential of comic modes. This incredibly detailed work on the overlooked area of female bodies in comic texts makes a unique and important contribution to scholarship on literature and medicine.”— Laura R. Kremmel, author of Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies
"Offering deft and stimulating comparisons of eighteenth-century comic fiction and scientific writing, Body Language adds a vital chapter to the study of medicine, literature, and gender in the period. Alves's insightful analysis of seven novels alongside a range of medical texts shows how the female body, as a cultural signifier, can tell new stories."— Heather Meek, author of Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain
"An erudite, engaging account of how eighteenth-century comic novels refigure, in fascinating and unexpected ways, misogynistic medical theories about ciswomen's embodiment. Through meticulous excavation of eighteenth-century medical treatises and highly original close readings of canonical novels by Smollett, Sterne, Fielding, and Lennox, Alves offers compelling new dimensions to the literary histories of medicine, gender, and sexuality. A must-read for specialists and non-specialists alike!"— Jason Farr, author of Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
"A rich exploration of the interrelation of eighteenth-century literature and medicine, Body Language deftly connects the formal constraints on fictional characters to those medical discourse places on living women. Alves's lucid and often deeply funny readings show that a patriarchal medical establishment can find little harder to account for than the ways that women escape efforts to define and constrain them."— Erin M. Goss, author of Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth C
Topics
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 7, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781684485727
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781684485727
Keywords for this book
Fielding; Smollett; Sterne; Charlotte Lennox; Shamela; Pamela; Humphrey Clinker; Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones; Tristram Shandy; Peregrine Pickle; The Female Quixote; eighteenth-century fiction; eighteenth-century medicine; leaky women; somatic society; epistolary; feminist; feminism; female excess; Amelia; medical discourse; The Female Husband; masculinity; Lady Booby; Lady Bellaston; social hierarchy; gender binary; Enlightenment literature; fertility; the grotesque body; pregnancy in the eighteenth century; female agency; patriarchal fear; masculine anxiety; eighteenth-century obstetrics; hysteria theory; womb; satire; Walter Shandy; William Harvey; John Locke; Sally Pickle; marriage; motherhood; midwifery; Arabella; Mr. Glanville; physiology; Don Quixote; vitalism; patriarchal; Winifred Jenkins; Mrs. Trunnion; Poor Things; Bella Baxter; Godwin Baxter; Alfie Blessington; Thomas Laycock; Anne Finch; Lady Wortley Montagu; Simon Dickie; Eliza Haywood; Thomas Hobbes; Ludmilla Jordanova; Thomas Lockwood; Ruth Perry; Roy Porter; G.S. Rousseau; Robert Whytt; Gautier d'Agoty; Venus in the Cloister; history of medicine; Hardwicke Marriage Act; surgical violence; Libertine; history of gynecology; history of obstetrics; Herman Boerhaave; Thomas Laqueur; Sheridan; Bakhtin; Defoe; Barbauld; Kant; Lukacs; Pope; Dryden; Leake; iatromechanist; Dr. John Friend; Thomas Sydenham; Albrecht von Haller; John Whytt; William Cullen; nervous disorder; menstruation theory; menstruation; Emmenologia; emmenology; catamenia; women's studies; womens studies; medical history
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
