Body Language

Kathleen Tamayo Alves is an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College of The City University of New York. Her research centers on eighteenth-century literature and culture, medicine, and literary history, and she has recently published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

• Introduction: Eighteenth-Century Medicine and Comic Representations of Women 1. Leaky Writings and Leaky Bodies in Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771)2. Hysterical Language and Desiring Women in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749)3. The Maternal Body and Obstetric Authority in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) and Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751)4. Romantic (Mis)Readings and Nervous Sympathy in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752)Coda: Surgical Violence as a Tool of Masculine Dominance in Poor Things (2023)AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex