ABSTRACT
It doesn’t sound very nice. Unlike ‘Pleasure’, say, or ‘Laughter’ or ‘Desire’ or ‘Love’, ‘Wounds’ is perhaps not a particularly appealing topic. Just by way of reassurance: we do not propose to offer a detailed inventory of gory events, gruesome injuries and ghastly moments of self-harm in literature. Chambers dictionary gives the primary meaning of ‘wound’ as ‘a physical injury’ that has been caused (in the dictionary’s perhaps slightly over-enthusiastic phrasing) by events such as ‘cutting, piercing, striking, crushing, tearing or poisoning’. ‘Wound’ in this respect may apply to plants (especially trees) as well as to animals (human or otherwise). But we also speak of wounds in a more figurative sense, when we talk of wounded pride, say, or wounded feelings, of feeling hurt, gutted or broken-hearted. In this respect wounds are not only physical but psychological, and indeed they are just as much at home in the enigmatic borderlands between the corporeal and the mental.
