This selective literary history of tears and bodily porosity offers something new and different: it is not an enumeration of weepers in different texts, and it argues against hypotheses (such as by Thomas Dixon) that claim that the British have a unique way of dealing with tears. Instead, it focuses more on the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite - closure, containment and stoniness - arguing that Romeos, Pamelas or Harleys tears are neither British nor Italian excretions, but markers that indicate the extent to which different societies and epochs respond to and tolerate bodily porosity. From this new angle, literary history turns out to be a meandering narrative in which female porosity and manly stoniness clash, in which their relationship is constantly re-negotiated and in which effusive and feminine genres (letters, poetic effusions, streams of consciousness) are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity (epitaphs, sonnets, stanzas etymologically seen as architectural rooms). Taking in works from writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, John Keats, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders.
