Intro -- Praise for The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- 1 The Life of Breath: Contexts and Approaches -- Contexts and Approaches: 'The Age of the Breath'? -- The Life of Breath Project -- The Life of Breath: From Classical to Contemporary -- Selected Bibliography -- Part I The Classical Period -- 2 Pneumatic Episodes from Homer to Galen -- Introduction -- Breath and Life in the Earliest Greek Literature -- Air/Breath/Wind as Life Force in Early Greek Philosophy and Medicine -- Breath, Blood, and Respiration in Early Greek Thought -- Breath/pneuma as Life-Generating Substance -- Galen on the Use of Breathing and the Causes of Breathlessness -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- 3 Our Common Breath: 'Conspiration' from the Stoics to the Church Fathers -- Bibliography -- 4 Late Antique Cultures of Breath: Politics and the Holy Spirit -- Breath and Human Difference in Late Antique Rome -- The Holy Spirit and Breath -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Part II The Medieval Period -- 5 From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts -- Breath, Pneuma, and Embodied Being -- Fainting Hearts -- Awakening Life -- Swooning into Vision -- Selected Bibliography -- 6 The Transformative Power of Breath: Music, Alternative Therapy, and Medieval Practices of Contemplation -- *** -- *** -- *** -- Selected Bibliography -- 7 A Breath of Fresh Air: Approaches to Environmental Health in Late Medieval Urban Communities -- Selected Bibliography -- Part III The Early Modern Period -- 8 'Being Breathed': From King Lear to Clinical Medicine -- I -- II -- III -- IV -- Seleted Bibliography -- 9 'Let Lovers Sigh Out the Rest': Witnessing the Breath in the Early Modern Emotional Body -- Selected Bibliography.

10 What Is 'the Breath of Our Nostrils'? Ruach and Neshamah in John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Day Sermon -- Bibliography -- Part IV The Eighteenth Century -- 11 Breathscapes: Natural Environments in Eighteenth-Century Physiology and Psychosomatics of Breathing -- Respiration in Eighteenth-Century Medicine -- The Psychosomatics of Indoor Breathing -- Conclusion -- Selected Bibliography -- 12 'Spoken from the Impulse of the Moment': Epistolarity, Sensibility, and Breath in Frances Burney's Evelina -- Selected Bibliography -- 13 'Eloquence and Oracle': Tobacco in Eighteenth-Century Life and Literature -- A Deep History of Tobacco in Lowland South America -- Tobacco Constituting Persons, Shifting Shapes, and Changing Perspectives -- Tobacco Generates Dualisms -- Tobacco in Enlightenment Life and Thought -- The Stupefying Pleasures and Material Sociality of Tobacco -- Tobacco and Embodied Cognition -- Tobacco and the Scientific Separation of 'Facts' and 'Values' -- 'It'-Narratives and the Poetry of Attention-Changing Perspectives? -- The Silence of Tobacco -- Conclusion -- Selected Bibliography -- Part V The Romantic and Victorian Periods -- 14 Romantic Consumption: The Paradox of Fashionable Breath -- Fashionable Consumptive Breath -- Alastor and Romantic Death-Fashionable Breath -- Conclusions -- Selected Bibliography -- 15 Endless Breath? The Pipe Organ and Immortality -- Selected Bibliography -- 16 London Fog as Food: From Pabulum to Poison -- Selected Bibliography -- 17 'Now-for a breath I tarry': Breath, Desire, and Queer Materialism at the fin de si�ecle -- Sexology, Embodiment, and Breath: Atmungstypus M�annlich -- A. E. Housman: 'Beneath the Suffocating Night' -- John Addington Symonds: 'I Seem to Feel the Aura in Him' -- Walter Pater: 'Fade Out of the World like a Breath' -- Selected Bibliography -- Part VI The Twentieth Century.

18 The Forgotten Obvious: Breathing in Psychoanalysis -- Vagitus-Rattles -- On the Self-Steering Respiration -- Jung's Pneumograph -- Against Breath: Freud and the Foreclosed Symptom -- Nasus-Interruptus -- The Wolfman -- Respiratory Erotism -- Conclusion: Respiration and Personality -- Selected Bibliography -- 19 Mysterious Gear: Modernist Mountaineering, Oxygen Rigs, and the Politics of Breath -- Selected Bibliography -- 20 Hearing the Form: Breath and the Structures of Poetry in Charles Olson and Paul Celan -- Selected Bibliography -- 21 A Panting Consciousness: Beckett, Breath, and Biocognitive Feedback -- Breath and Consciousness: A Co-dependent Intimacy -- The 'I-Breathe': Agency, Time-Consciousness, and Biocognitive Tempos -- Breathing Mediacy: Knowing, Experiencing, Witnessing -- Knowing, Experiencing, Witnessing -- Conclusion -- Selected Bibliography -- Part VII The Twenty-First Century -- 22 Syllabic Gasps: M. NourbeSe Philip and Charles Olson's Poetic Conspiration -- Selected Bibliography -- 23 Visualising the Ephemeral -- Part 1: A History in Epitomes -- Part 2: My Own Work-in the Laboratory -- in Hospital and Hospice -- Selected Bibliography -- 24 Breath-As Subject, in Form, in Performance: An Interview with Michael Symmons Roberts -- Selected Bibliography -- 25 Afterword: Breath-Taking-Ethical Impulses for Breath Studies -- Conspiration and Conspiracies -- Capacities -- Inscriptions -- (Dis)Placements -- Conspirations and Common -- Selected Bibliography -- Index.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2023. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.