front cover of Making a Social Body
Making a Social Body
British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864
Mary Poovey
University of Chicago Press, 1995
With much recent work in Victorian studies focused on gender and class differences, the homogenizing features of 19th-century culture have received relatively little attention. In Making a Social Body, Mary Poovey examines one of the conditions that made the development of a mass culture in Victorian Britain possible: the representation of the population as an aggregate—a social body. Drawing on both literature and social reform texts, she analyzes the organization of knowledge during this period and explores its role in the emergence of the idea of the social body.

Poovey illuminates the ways literary genres, such as the novel, and innovations in social thought, such as statistical thinking and anatomical realism, helped separate social concerns from the political and economic domains. She then discusses the influence of the social body concept on Victorian ideas about the role of the state, examining writings by James Phillips Kay, Thomas Chalmers, and Edwin Chadwick on regulating the poor. Analyzing the conflict between Kay's idea of the social body and Babbage's image of the social machine, she considers the implications of both models for the place of Victorian women. Poovey's provocative readings of Disraeli's Coningsby, Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend show that the novel as a genre exposed the role gender played in contemporary discussions of poverty and wealth.

Making a Social Body argues that gender, race, and class should be considered in the context of broader concerns such as how social authority is distributed, how institutions formalize knowledge, and how truth is defined.
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front cover of Reading The Social Body
Reading The Social Body
Catherine B. Burroughs
University of Iowa Press, 1993

 The overarching argument of Reading the Social Body is that the body is cultural rather than “natural.” Some of the essays treat the social construction of bodies that have actually existed in human history; others discuss the representation of bodies in artistic contexts; all recognize that everything visible to the human body—from posture and costume to the width of an eyebrow or a smile—is determined by and shaped in response to a particular culture.

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Writing AIDS
(Re)Conceptualizing the Individual and Social Body in
Jodie Parys
The Ohio State University Press, 2012
Writing AIDS: (Re)Conceptualizing the Individual and Social Body in Spanish American Literature by Jodie Parys examines the ways in which AIDS has pervaded the personal and social imaginings of the body by highlighting textual representations found in Spanish American literature where AIDS has a significant role. This book addresses the current void in literary theory about HIV/AIDS in Spanish America by drawing together diverse literary texts to illuminate how these Spanish American writers have chosen to depict this disease and how their texts will be archived for future generations. All of the works are united under the broad topic of the body, conceived of as the individual comprising a physical, emotional, and spiritual entity both in isolation and in communion with others. Because HIV and AIDS are physical viruses that attack real bodies, it is the initial portal of entry into the exploration of the notion of identity and how it is impacted and altered by the arrival of AIDS. However, each individual is also a part of a larger community, and the virus itself impacts society as well as individuals. These separate but related concepts—the individual and social bodies—are the uniting themes that are woven throughout the entire study.
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