Tears, Liquids and Porous Bodies in Literature Across the Ages

Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bront, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature. Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite closure, containment and stoniness and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which female porosity and manly stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity. This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and feminine genres, such as sloppy letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.