This essay explores two questions: what are the literary pleasures of practical writing, and
what sorts of fantasies and concerns attend reading's extension to the extra-textual world …

Physiognomy is a ubiquitous subject of both pressing contemporary concern and genuine
antiquarian early—modern interest. By examining the ways in which physiognomical …

The literature on physiognomy the art of studying a person s outward appearance,
especially the face, in order to determine character and intelligence has flourished in recent …

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing
that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work's sociopolitical heft and …

Physiognomy, the art or science of reading character through the face, enjoyed an
enormous vogue throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a …

Descriptions of late eighteenth-century heroines illustrate an important chapter in the history
of perception. The apparently conventional and vague attributive language, by which the …

'Dere lord Ihesu mercy, þat welle art of mercy, why wyl not myn herte breste and cleue in-
two?'1 So begins the shorter of Richard Rolle's Meditations on the Passion, a fourteenth …

'Boistous', along with 'rude', is a common descriptor for Middle English writings, and has
often been understood to point to writers' anxieties over the inferiority of English as a literary …

This essay hopes to add to the impressive array of criticism and scholarship about
the'science'of physiognomy, derived from Lavater, in Dickens, focussing chiefly on its role in …

The treatises dating from Geoffrey Chaucer's era that deal with the pseudo-science of
physiognomy are usually contained in versions of the long-popular Secreta Secretorum …