Deconstructing the Body in Antiquity and Modernity

This multidisciplinary volume explores ancient and modern corporeal relational dynamics, as well as the agents and processes that produce dominant cultural definitions and elaborations of the body.Bringing together leading experts in Humanities, Medical Humanities, Social Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences, the volume draws on recent theoretical approaches (such as 'the ontological turn', new materialisms, 'the corporeal turn', queer theory, ritual theory), philosophical approaches, and advances in disability studies, and examines a variety of processes of bodily fragmentation, fusion, and trans-formation with additional focus on gender, age, socio-cultural status, and religious belief. It is organised into two parts - Fragmentation and Fusion, and Foci, Frontiers, Trans-Formations - which foreground the lived body and reconceptualise it through the prism of corporeal constructivism, challenging hierarchical and temporal primacies and instead exploring how different bodily explanations, perceptions, and representations relate and interact.Deconstructing the Body in Antiquity and Modernity will interest students and scholars working on the body, body parts, and body relational dynamics across various disciplines, including the Arts, Humanities, Medical Humanities, Social Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences.

About the Author

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on ancient Greek culture, especially religion and magic. Most recently, she originated and led the Virtual Reality Oracle project (see vroracle.co.uk). Her latest monograph is Metamorphosis, Landscape, and Trauma in Greco-Roman Myth.

Georgia Petridou is Reader in Ancient Greek History at the University of Liverpool. She works on Classical literature, Greek epigraphy, history of Greek and Roman religion, ancient medicine in its socio-cultural contexts, and medical humanities. Her most recent work includes a monograph entitled Medicine and Mysteries in Aelius Aristides' Hieroi Logoi: The Mysian Patient , and a bilingual New Pauly Supplement volume entitled, Ancient Religion in Context co-edited with J. N. Bremmer and J. Rüpke.