Includes bibliographical references.

Body and Society in Pre-Norman England / Maria Eliferova -- 'A Compleat Body of Divinity': Visions of Sexuality and the Body in Puritan New England / Astrid M. Fellner -- Child Abuse and White Slavery in 19th-century Britain / Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz -- Feminism versus Femininity: the Significance of Women's Sporting Dress in Britain (1860-1914) / Richard Sibley -- Body, Size or Dress Matters: Representation of the Dandiacal Male Body in some fashionable 19th-century Novels / Gilbert Pham-Thanh -- The Non-Human Colonial Subject: the Importance of Animal Bodies to British Imperialism / Sune Borkfelt -- English Vaccinal Unworthiness of Democracy / Logie Barrow.

"The human body is always changing its meanings. Historical research on this can draw on a host of specialisms. Historians, lettrists and linguists contribute to this book a coherent little tumult of perspectives: what was thinkable for pagan and Christian Anglo-Saxons, and how far did the two really differ? Why did New English Puritans stop addressing God as if He were their breast-feeding Mother? How did Western colonisers' perspectives on animals and on 'subject races' interact? How did Victorian and Edwardian women's participation in sports grow? How transgressive was the figure of the 'dandy'? What motivated late-Victorian panics over prostitution, and on what terms were victims helped? Why, in an increasingly 'democratic' age, did reactions to Britain's first universal health-measure become a basis for cynicism about the masses?

Repeatedly, the rigidity of separation between male and female fluctuated, as did the boundaries themselves. Sometimes, the greater the rigidity, the less the sources may tell us of resistance to them. But sometimes this can be inferred indirectly."--Pub. desc

Print version record.