Eyes function as organs of both perception and expression: they can see, but they can also show. Challenging a long-running scholarly bias in favour of their visual function, Weeping Eyes foregrounds the organ's major role in affect and emotion, probing the different ways that tears are conceptualised in both sentimental and scientific literature. Centred around the rise of ophthalmology as a discipline in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, it considers how historical developments in ocular science shaped literary depictions of seeing and feeling. By rethinking what it can mean to cry, Megan Nash overturns critical paradigms that have long dominated ideas of the eyes and vision, and tackles some of the most pressing conceptual questions of affect studies.
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'In this original, erudite book Nash deftly analyses how sight and insight operate in a complex observational network. Weeping Eyes masterfully weaves various scientific and literary discourses into a compelling critical narrative.' Albert J. Rivero, Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English, Marquette University 'Weeping Eyes offers a timely contribution to materialist and embodied readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Drawing on a compelling range of sources Nash offers a sensitive reading of the significance of vision in the development of sympathetic feeling, whilst also newly-assessing the messy and disruptive force of eyes that weep and hurt.' Heather Tilley, author of Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
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A paradigm-shifting study into the eye's affective role in sentimental and scientific literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Introduction;
1. Adam Smith's sore eyes;
2. Richardson's liquid proofs;
3. Burney's salt rheum;
4. Dickens's optic nerve;
5. Collins's sentimental
secretions; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Megan Nash a Lecturer in English and Drama at the University of Auckland. She deploys her multi-disciplinary training in research that operates at the junction between literature and biology, and has published research in both disciplines, in journals including Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 19, and PNAS.
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