Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association

Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. By DANILO PUNDAY. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2003. x+234 pp. 42.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1-4039-6241-3.

Daniel Punday announces that 'After a decade of suspicion about language's ability to refer to anything beyond itself, the body has emerged as a site where the power and problems of reference play themselves out' (p. 1). He argues that narratology, with its insistence on abstraction, 'has had difficulty dealing with the concrete historical object of the human body', while new historicism 'has made no attempt to generalize its analysis of the...

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