Nicht aus der Schweiz? Besuchen Sie lehmanns.de
A Grammar of the Corpse - Elizabeth Spragins

A Grammar of the Corpse

Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Buch | Softcover
224 Seiten
2023
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5315-0157-0 (ISBN)
CHF 43,60 inkl. MwSt
No matter when or where one starts telling the story of the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (August 4, 1578), the precipitating event for the formation of the Iberian Union, one always stumbles across dead bodies—rotting in the sun on abandoned battlefields, publicly displayed in marketplaces, exhumed and transported for political uses. A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean proposes an approach to understanding how dead bodies anchored the construction of knowledge within early modern Mediterranean historiography.

A Grammar of the Corpse argues that the presence of the corpse in historical narrative is not incidental. It fills a central gap in testimonial narrative: providing tangible evidence of the narrator’s reliability while provoking an affective response in the audience. The use of corpses as a source of narrative authority mobilizes what cultural historians, philosophers, and social anthropologists have pointed to as the latent power of the dead for generating social and political meaning and knowledge. A Grammar of the Corpse analyzes the literary, semiotic, and epistemological function these bodies serve within text and through language. It finds that corpses are indexically present and yet disturbingly absent, a tension that informs their fraught relationship to their narrators’ own bodies and makes them useful but subversive tools of communication and knowledge.

A Grammar of the Corpse complements recent work in medieval and early modern Iberian and Mediterranean studies to account for the confessional, ethnic, linguistic, and political diversity of the region. By reading Arabic texts alongside Portuguese and Spanish accounts of this key event, the book responds to the fundamental provocation of Mediterranean studies to work beyond the linguistic limitations of modern national boundaries.

Elizabeth Spragins is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross.

Preface | vii

Introduction: Necroepistemology | 1

1 Presence: Here Are the Dead | 25

2 Absence: Disappearing the Royal Dead | 45

3 Vitality: Wounded Narrators and the Living Dead | 69

4 Assemblage: Recovering Diplomatic Power with Corpses | 89

5 Erasure: Corpse Desecration for Narrative Control | 110

Epilogue | 135

Acknowledgments | 141

Notes | 145

Bibliography | 195

Index | 215

Erscheinungsdatum
Zusatzinfo 4 b/w illustrations
Verlagsort New York
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Geschichte Teilgebiete der Geschichte Religionsgeschichte
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10 1-5315-0157-5 / 1531501575
ISBN-13 978-1-5315-0157-0 / 9781531501570
Zustand Neuware
Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt?
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart

von Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson; Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson …

Buch | Hardcover (2022)
C.H.Beck (Verlag)
CHF 47,60
warum die Religionen erst im Mittelalter entstanden sind

von Dorothea Weltecke

Buch | Hardcover (2024)
C.H.Beck (Verlag)
CHF 53,20