Claire L. Carlin Bücher

Exploring the ideological foundations of contagion theories in early modern Europe, this volume features contributions from literary scholars, cultural historians, and medical historians. It examines how the fear of disease and the quest for understanding have persisted through history, influencing societal attitudes and moral judgments. The authors draw parallels between historical and contemporary outbreaks, such as HIV and SARS, highlighting the ongoing human struggle with illness and the implications for social ostracism and moral discourse.

Women Reading Feminist Psychocriticisms of 'Le Cid' is a series of readings from the famous seventeenth-century French play, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (1637). Using a reader-centered approach, this study applies five different examples of feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism to Corneille’s masterpiece in order to illustrate the enduring interest of the play. At the same time, it explores several issues in the ongoing debates within feminist criticism. Topics such as biological essentialism, identity construction, and the conflict between Anglo-American and French feminist theory are discussed in the work of Carol Gilligan, Jessica Benjamin, Jane Gallop, Juliette Mitchell, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Le Cid furnishes the framework for five divergent readings grounded in the seventeenth-century context, despite their emphasis on feminist reading practices of our era.