This chapter examines Lucian’s manipulation of images of geographical authority in his True Histories, with particular reference to his representation of human and other bodies immersed in their environments. It look first at the tension between detached geographical observation and images of bodily immersion or entanglement with particular landscapes both in imperial Greek literature more broadly, and also in Lucian’s work, where that theme has a particular prominence. That point is illustrated first through discussion of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, which returns repeatedly to images that challenge the idea of a clear dividing line between bodies and their environments, and also between observer and participant status. The second half of the chapter then traces the contrast between detached observation and corporeal immersion through the True Histories, especially in the scenes in the stomach of the whale, from 1.30–2.20, arguing that Lucian in this text undercuts notions of detached geographical authority in ways that are closely related to his comical undermining of various other kinds of intellectual and social pretension in his other works.

What is the stuff of dictionaries? And why does thinking about that stuff matter?  These are the paramount questions of this chapter. The physical print dictionary is a specter that looms large in media and the popular imagination, but dictionaries aren’t just or only big books. Accordingly, this chapter begins by drawing attention to the wide array of material incarnations dictionaries have taken – the tablets and scrolls that preceded books, the websites and apps that have superseded them. Next, it considers the materialities necessary to making and using those various forms: the evolving variety of tools available to amateur and professional lexicographers; the implements of interaction deployed by dictionary readers; the traces of production, circulation, and reception that exist in private collections and informal or institutional archives. Finally, I’ll describe some non-textual uses of dictionaries; just as dictionaries aren’t only books, they aren’t only consulted for their content but rather mobilized to a range of physical, aesthetic, symbolic ends.

This chapter discusses the contribution of anthropology to the understanding of the diversity of practices and attitudes towards sexualized bodies developed by different human cultures, beginning with the works of classical anthropologists, including E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Margaret Mead and Bronisław Malinowski. It discusses Marxist, feminist, and postmodern anthropology, and reflects on the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his notion of the dispositif, the device of sexuality. The chapter argues that the device of sexuality—that is, that there is such a thing as “sexuality”—is modern and Western. The sexual life of the peoples studied by anthropologists is an inseparable part of their social order and its reproduction, and in no way constitutes a separate sphere of existence that can be studied as such, nor does it constitute the core of any identity, either personal or collective. The task of anthropology consists in restoring how these peoples deal with the sexual in their own social and cultural terms, respecting their radical otherness.

Histories of both emotion and sexuality explore the ways that bodies and embodied practices are shaped by time, culture, and location. This chapter uses the theoretical and methodological insights from the History of Emotions to consider the emotions associated with sexuality and how these have taken cultural form at different moments. It first considers the emotions related to sexual function and desire, noting how different biological models informed what emotions were expected and experienced. It then turns to love as the predominant emotion connected with sexual practices, considering the boundaries of who and what should be incorporated within such feeling. The chapter then turns to an exploration of the emotions, particularly intimacy, of reproductive labour, acknowledging sexual practices, including those are contractual and exploitative, that sometimes sit uneasily within a framework of love. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the emotions produced by the management and policing of sexuality, such as shame and loneliness, recognising that sexuality has been a contested moral domain for many groups. Using diverse examples across time and space, this chapter seeks to denaturalise the emotions of sexuality and to provide a framework upon which further research can build.

The Voyage to Brobdingnag reduces Gulliver from the magnanimous and principled behemoth of the Voyage to Lilliput to a risible and contemptible little beast. The first section considers how Gulliver is diminished to an inconsequential creature, objectified and commodified by the giants who handle him as a freak show exhibit or a pet. The second section contends that Gulliver does recuperate his human identity, albeit in a precarious manner, by differentiating himself from animals he encounters in Brobdingnag. However, he is confronted with the disgusting physicality of humans, making his restitution of human identity highly ambivalent. The third section examines how the satire is broadened from human nature to political institutions in Gulliver’s dialogue with the king and account of Brobdingnagian society. The destabilisation of species boundaries and pessimism about human corruption in this voyage are key to the overall vision of Gulliver’s Travels.

The portrayal of male and female bodies in Gulliver’s Travels has long been the subject of critical debate, from early suggestions that Swift was motivated by personal animus against Maids of Honour to more recent studies characterising him as an inveterate misogynist or an effeminised admirer of women. This chapter suggests that the depictions of female bodies must be read alongside Gulliver’s preoccupation with his own body and its functions, and these representations should be understood in the context of a culture in which sexuality provided a recognised shorthand for political debate. The aristocratic rakish discourse of Restoration theatre, with its presentation of relations between men and women through metaphors of battle and struggle, was being challenged by the emergence of sentimental dramas celebrating marital harmony. Gulliver’s horror at female bodies and his idealisation of the social systems of Lilliput and Houyhnhnmland challenge the fetishisation of the family and reverence for domesticity that were increasingly characterising moral discourse and found their ideal form for expression in the development of the novel.

Pattern books provided guidelines for how to make garments. Chapter 8 explores approaches to the problem posed by physical intimacy between the normatively male tailor and a female client in a social and political climate characterized by avoidance of sex. Drawing the body in this environment was necessary to providing instructions but presented graphic artists with a huge challenge. A comparison of lessons in ‘how to take a measurement’ in the Mao years shows that this challenge sometimes proved too much. During the Cultural Revolution, images of women were occasionally omitted from pattern books altogether. Under these circumstances, the zhifu had virtually no competition.

As David Hillman and Ulrika Maud note, ‘the body has always been a contested site’.1 This chapter applies Sara Ahmed’s position that the racialisation of bodies occurs through a differentiation between bodies on the grounds of Otherness, and argues that the period between 1780 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 witnessed a distinctive chapter in the racialisation of British women.2 Racialisation is, as Ahmed asserts, a process that takes place in time and space, and which has ‘multiple histories’.3 Surveillance likewise can be understood as a process as much as an act, and is ‘historically present not just in technology or statecraft, but also in society and culture’.4 During this ‘long’ nineteenth century between 1780 and 1914, the long-standing idea that women were biologically distinct from men became, for the first time, legitimised by science and the Victorian state, and women’s physical bodies themselves became platforms for surveillance. In a period which has been recognised by many as a turning point for overt information collection, women became almost literal information objects.5

By attending to a common theatrical convention – the representation of both dead and apparently dead bodies by actors – Chapter 1 offers a new history of early modern English tragicomedy. In all theatrical performance, the actor’s body is semiotically volatile, for its liveliness can never be entirely circumscribed by the onstage fiction. This chapter demonstrates that the early modern theater frequently exacerbated that necessary instability by requiring its actors to feign death. Tracking instances of apparent death from the late 1580s through the opening of the seventeenth century, the chapter shows that theater practitioners increasingly invited their spectators to apprehend the ambiguity of the lively stage corpse, entwining them in uncertainty by offering them less and less interpretive guidance about the actor’s inevitable signs of life. Audiences gradually came to expect that they could not know the fictional status of apparent corpses. The conventions that eventually coalesced around stage corpses enabled the rise of English tragicomedy, the hybrid genre that allowed for seemingly dead bodies to resurrect themselves without warning.

This chapter examines how Faulkner uses the trope of parchment skin in his 1932 novel Light in August to describe his racially ambiguous protagonist Joe Christmas who becomes marked as Black through a range of media forms including magazines, Bibles, blackboards, and a Kodak print. While Faulkner can be patronizing in his depictions of writing by African American characters, the use of African drumming in his story “Red Leaves” (1930) to communicate over long distances in an earlier form of writing-at-a-distance that we find in telegraphy exemplifies powerful kinds of communication by Black characters. The chapter shows how Faulkner reworks the issue of race and writing materials in Intruder in the Dust (1948), refiguring the white pencil of the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse in his fictional town of Jefferson into the white pencil of a flashlight beam that portends racial change. The chapter concludes with a discussion of writing by American Indian characters that range from lampoons to meditations on genre where Native literacy undercuts romantic stereotypes.

Death investigation was a central aspect of forensic medicine. However, doctors struggled with uncertainty in defining and evaluating signs of death, at the same time as popular fears of premature burial abounded. Moreover, they faced considerable difficulties in distinguishing between homicides, suicides, and natural or accidental deaths and in determining the cause of death. Anxiety about insufficiently trained and incompetent practitioners who performed medicolegal duties that exceeded the limits of their knowledge and skills fueled demands for medicolegal reform. As medicolegal expertise played a more and more decisive role in criminal investigations and prosecutions, flawed forensic expertise became an increasingly salient problem that sparked ongoing debates about possible structural solutions.

Chapter 7 presents the third of the three case studies: Killing the Individual Human Being via Drones. Here I look at targeted killings and the growing use of drones in this practice. The chapter offers a detailed discussion of the predominantly legal and ethical debate. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates the relevance of an analysis guided by insights from IR theory. But it also discusses legal questions concerning International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law. The case study engages in detail with the general discourse on drone strikes and targeted killings and provides an in-depth analysis of specific strike types and drone strikes. The analysis demonstrates how the individual human being appears as an innocent civilian who should not be killed (if possible) or as a guilty terrorist who should be killed.

Chapter 1 spans the first decade of Cuban independence and explores the juxtaposition of “modern” concerns like hygiene and ancient concerns like honor and proper behavior. At the turn of the century, domestic workers’ physical bodies were subjects of scrutiny and avatars for early republican anxieties. Wet-nursing in particular was a hugely important topic as high infant mortality rates plagued the island. The Cuban government’s focus on literal hygiene and the figurative hygiene of the new republic regularly resulted in a hostile fixation on working-class women’s bodies and movements. The chapter examines the connections between domestic service and prostitution and uses court cases to demonstrate the physical vulnerability of African-descended women and girls both before and after slavery’s end in Cuba.

This chapter begins with surveyors Alexander and James Gerard, and their attempts to prove that they had climbed higher than Alexander von Humboldt. In examining the measuring practices of East India Company surveyors, the chapter especially deals with moments when scientific instruments were found to be inadequate. These are revealing of the importance instruments played in establishing scientific authority in a world in which the senses were unreliable. This chapter firstly considers responses to damaged instruments, and attempts at repair. This is followed by a discussion of surveyors’ fieldbooks and inscriptive practices. It concludes with an examination of ongoing problems – both conceptual and material – with instruments designed in Europe by those with no experience of the Himalaya. The chapter argues that the staggered recognition of the true scale of the Himalaya reveals multiple levels of displacement in scientific practice: between those in the mountains, those in Calcutta and those in London. In so doing, it emphasises the laboriousness of the instrumental measurements necessary to impose, if incompletely, a form of universality that made global comparisons possible.

Altitude sickness was little understood in the early nineteenth century, and the inconsistency of symptoms led some to doubt a constant cause. This led to tensions when European travellers were forced to compare their bodily performance against their South Asian companions. This chapter begins by contextualising altitude sickness in relation to lowland colonial anxieties around health, acclimatisation and air. Next is a discussion of indigenous understandings of altitude and a consideration of the ways the performances of bodies were recorded in travel narratives. Finally, the chapter considers experimental approaches around quantification. The chapter argues that there was a politics of comparison that developed around altitude sickness at multiple scales: in the way bodies, European and South Asian, experienced altitude sickness; in the way comparisons affected interactions within expedition parties; in the way these were represented in written accounts to avoid upsetting supposed superiority; and in the way these ultimately constituted high mountains as aberrant environments in relation to lowland norms.

This chapter focuses on how two involuntary (and often invisible) physical responses, blanching and blushing, are performed and narrated on the early modern stage, asking who describes bodies, whose bodies are described, and what is at stake in the act of description. Whipday explores how blanching and blushing intersects with early modern hierarchies of gender, class, family, and race, especially as mediated by the (white) body of the (boy) actor in ‘blushface’ and blackface performances of femininity. In so doing, she examines narrated bodily responses as dramaturgical devices for negotiating relationships between the physicality of character and performer; between performer and audience in the audience’s engagement with the world of the play as mapped onto the simultaneously real and imagined body of the actor; and, between onstage characters within hierarchical familial, domestic, and service relationships.