This book argues that while pain is an irreducible neuro-physiological phenomenon, how pain is experienced is powerfully inflected by language and culture. Using Second Empire France after Napoleon III's seizure of power as a particularly revealing time of re-acculturation, it elaborates on the "culture of denial."

Autorentext
VAHEED RAMAZANI is Associate Professor of French, Tulane University.

Inhalt
PART I Neural Communities The Mother of All things: War Reason and the Gendering of Pain PART II Overwriting History: Irony and the Sublime in L'Education Sentimentale Writing in Pain: Baudelaire, Benjamin, Haussman Reproducing Women: Nationalism and Natality in Au Bonheur des Dames