The Body and the Arts focuses on the dynamic relation between the body and the arts: the body as inspiration, subject, symbol and medium. Contributors from a variety of disciplines explore this relation across a range of periods and art forms, spanning medicine, literature from the classical period to the present, and visual and performing arts.

The Body and the Arts focuses on the dynamic relation between the body and the arts: the body as inspiration, subject, symbol and medium. Contributors from a variety of disciplines explore this relation across a range of periods and art forms, spanning medicine, literature from the classical period to the present, and visual and performing arts.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; C.Saunders, U.Maude  and J.Macnaughton PART I: THINKING THE BODY Polyclitus among the Philosophers: Canons of Classical Beauty; G.Boys-Stones Body as Graced or Vile: Tensions in the Christian Vision; D.Brown The Smoke of the Soul: Anatomy, Medical Spirits and the Rete Mirabile: 1538-1643; R.Sugg The Fizziness Business; S.Connor Flesh Revealed: Medicine, Art and Anatomy; J.Macnaughton PART II: WRITING THE BODY The Affective Body: Love, Virtue and Vision in English Medieval Literature; C.Saunders Victorian Literature and Bringing the Body Back from the Dead; F.O'Gorman Modernist Bodies: Coming to Our Senses;  U.Maude Writing the Body: Modernism and Postmodernism;  P.Waugh Detective Fiction and the Body;  P.D.James (in conversation with C.Saunders) PART III: VIEWING THE BODY Pygmalion, Painted Flesh, and the Female Body; M.Postle Satyrs, Harpies, Jellyfish, and Mutants: Ovidian Metamorphosis in Contemporary Art; M.Warner Body, Space, Time; A.Gormley Une écriture corporelle: The Dancer in the Text of Mallarmé and Yeats; S.Jones The Erotic and the Sacred Body in Opera: the Venusberg to Monsalvat – and beyond;  D.Fuller Celluloid Formaldehyde? The Body on Film; J.Buchanan Index