The 'material turn' in critical theory - and particularly the turn towards the body coupled with scientific insights from biomedicine, biology and physics - is becoming an important path in fields of humanities-based scholarly inquiry. Material and technological philosophies play an increasingly central role in disciplines such as literary studies, cultural studies, history, performance and aesthetics, to name only a few. This edited collection of essays investigates how the material turn finds applications within humanities-based frameworks - focusing on practical reflections and disciplinary responses. It takes as its critical premise the understanding that importation of theoretical viewpoints is never straightforward; rather, a complex, sometimes even fraught, communication takes place between these disciplines at the imperceptible lines where praxis and theory meet, transforming both the landscape of practical engagement and the models of material theory. Presenting a multi- and interdisciplinary consideration of current research on the cultural relationship to living (and non-living) bodies, Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement puts the body in focus. From performance and body modification to film, literature and other cultural technologies, this volume undertakes a significant speculative mapping of the current possibilities for engagement, transformation and variance of embodied movement in relation to scientifically-situated corporealities and materialities in cultural and artistic practices. Time and time again, it finds these ever-shifting modes of being to be inextricably interdependent and coextensive: movement requires embodiment; and embodiment is a form of movement.

This book examines late 19th-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siecle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key 19th-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the crisis in gender or sexual anarchy of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine, As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation

The first full-length study of modern technologies in late-Victorian New Woman writing This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siecle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the 'crisis in gender' or 'sexual anarchy' of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation. Key Features An important addition, specifically in its focus on gender relations, to the growing field of literature and technology studies Examines New Woman fictions by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin Highlights the crucial connection between gender, medicine and technology in the late nineteenth century through the neglected figures of the New Woman nurse and doctor