The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian EraThe Suffering Self is a ground-breaking, interdisciplinary study of the spread of Christianity across the Roman empire. Judith Perkins shows how Christian narrative representation in the early empire worked to create a new kind of human self-understanding - the perception of the self as sufferer. Drawing on feminist and social theory, she addresses the question of why forms of suffering like martyrdom and self-mutilation were so important to early Christians. |
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... period, they must incorporate the testimony of many different kinds of discourses. In Leonard Tennenhouse's words, “the history of a culture is a history of all its products” (Tennenhouse 1982:141). Clifford Geertz also pointed to the ...
... period of a pronounced general interest in medicine as the prominence of the doctors Rufus , Soranus , Aretaeus , and Galen testified ( Nutton 1985 : 24 ) . Glen Bowersock pointed to the emphasis on the body and its health in the extant ...
... period . I wish to argue in this book that this emergent cultural subject , and the ideological shift it gives hint of , helped to enable the growth of Christianity . Before proceeding to outline my argument , I should locate my work in ...
... period , they must incorporate the testimony of many different kinds of discourses . In Leonard Tennenhouse's words , " the history of a culture is a history of all its products " ( Tennenhouse 1982 : 141 ) . Clifford Geertz also ...
... period work to produce particular “ subjectivities , ” i.e. , particular forms of self - understandings and particular social worlds that generate certain kinds of social power . The dominant power in a society is recognized as being ...
Contents
15 | |
MARRIAGES AS HAPPY ENDINGS | 41 |
PAIN WITHOUT EFFECT | 77 |
SUFFERING AND POWER | 104 |
The Acts of Peter | 124 |
THE SICK SELF | 142 |
IDEOLOGY NOT PATHOLOGY | 173 |
The Community of Sufferers | 200 |
Other editions - View all
The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era Judith Perkins No preview available - 1995 |