Flesh in the Age of Reason (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Roy Porter
- First Published: 2004
- Type of Work: History
- Time of Work: The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- Setting: England
- Genres: Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: Philosophy or philosophers, Nineteenth century, Literature, England or English people, Eighteenth century, Medicine, Health, Enlightenment, Great Britain
- Locales: England
Roy Porter's posthumously published Flesh in the Age of Reason, which boasts a forward by well-known scholar Simon Schama, offers a dazzling, highly readable account of post-Enlightenment perceptions of the relationship between the human mind and the human body. In four somewhat chronological sections, Porter demonstrates the shifting ideas of humankind as a profoundly bewildered subject inhabiting a finite, flesh-and-blood body. Porter focuses on how such secular constructs as literacy, consumerism, and the Industrial Revolution forced people to question the time-honored...
[The entire page is 1842 words long]
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