Symptomatic Subjects

Reviews / Votes

"Orlemanski has provided scholars of all kinds of late medieval texts with a vital set of critical tools with which they might newly attend to the uncertain, plural, and fluid relationship between body, self, and other, and to the sustained medieval conversations that took place between literary and medical writings." (Journal of British Studies) "Through her dynamic readings of texts that feature descriptions of bodily processes, Orlemanski shows that late medieval literary writers had come to see literary production as a space in which embodiment, textuality, and signification could be explored . . . [W]hat Orlemanski does in her literary readings is energizing and challenging. Her book's engagement with late medieval textuality and physicality will be of great interest to scholars in the field." (Studies in the Age of Chaucer) "[V]ery erudite and interesting . . . Symptomatic Subjects is an impressive tour de force of literary and philosophical- especially semiotic-analysis. As the title indicates, it centers on causality as manifested in ailing human bodies. Having established the historical and philosophical background, the author turns to contemporary literature to substantiate and analyze the medical contents of several works." (Isis) "[P]atient, sustained, synthetic historical exposition plays into patient, sustained, coherent, often intricate readings. The casually browsing reader might suppose this to be a literary history of
physik, but Symptomatic Subjects is more intellectually gripping than that.

" (SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900) "An exciting, accomplished, and dazzling book. Julie Orlemanski is reinventing the field of literature and medicine, making a signal contribution to the medical humanities while gifting the field of Middle English studies with a bracing series of new interpretations that will influence our readings of medieval and other literatures for many years to come." (Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia)