ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book is about the elements of bodily experience — such as those witnessed by the tourists at Lourdes — which were not easily discussed in nineteenth-century France, but which nonetheless elicited, and continue to elicit, a similarly contradictory response. They include unruly erotic desire, illness, masculine weakness and wounding, torture and sadism, disfigurement and disability, child abuse and rape. The book mobilizes the unexplored interpretative and critical potential of the taboo as a way of reading accounts of the body in nineteenth-century French fiction. It explores how anxieties around bodily representation undermine realism's claims to objectivity and transparency. The book discusses aspects of bodily reality which threaten les bonnes moeurs that are rarely allowed to occupy the foreground and are instead spurned or only partially alluded to by writers and critics.
