The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature

We live our lives as embodied creatures. The way we understand the body is very much the same way we understand ourselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the bodily creation of the human being is presented as the culmination of the deity’s work, beautifully captured by the poetic prose of the King James’s translation of the Bible: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have...