The Department of Studies in Culture and the Culture Vultures Reading Group invite all to a book launch of Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford by Dr Katarzyna Burzyńska. The presentation of the publication will take place on the 10th of May 2022 on MS Teams.
This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare’s and his contemporaries’ drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment it offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a range of pregnant characters and their pregnant embodiment in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency.
The presentation is part of an ongoing research project “Sir, she came in great with child, and longing”: phenomenology of pregnancy in English early modern drama (Measure for Measure, 2.1.96)” funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (No. UMO-2017/27/B/HS2/00089).
LINK TO THE MEETING
