The Book of Skin

by Steven Connor

The Book of Skin explores the amazingly elaborate and varied functions, roles and meanings of human skin within Western culture. Skin, Steven Connor argues, has never been more visible. He examines a wide range of sources, including literature, non-fiction and medical texts; art, photography and film; folklore, popular song and language. The book covers all aspects of skin’s cultural history, including the chromatics of skin colour and pigmentation, blushing, suntanning, paleness, darkening, tattooing, scarification, the Turin shroud, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the destructive rage exercised against skin in all kinds of violent fantasies, and the intensities and attenuations of touch. Connor also explains why particular colours are ascribed to feelings and conditions, such as green for envy, purple for rage and yellow for cowardice.Moving from the human body itself to photography and the cinema screen, and from medieval leprosy, Renaissance flaying, and syphilis to cosmetics, plastic surgery and contemporary skin cancers, the author fully surveys our skin’s obvious and yet unfamiliar terrain. The Book of Skin shows that skin has never been at once so manifest and so in jeopardy as it is today, when, as Marshall MacLuhan puts it, each of us wears all of mankind as his skin.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Medical, History

306 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Among his many books are explorations of aspects of the cultural history of the senses, including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), The Book of Skin (2004), and Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (2014). His most recent books are Dream Machines (2017), The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowledge (2019), and Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019).

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting and analytic look at skin and the many many ways it has been approached in Western society from early myth to the modern day take. Connor covers a wide range of subjects and sources from folklore and medicine to photography and film showing how the views on skin have and haven't changed over the years and how these views have governed various aspects of art, life, language and society as a whole. His writing is incredibly readable despite the somewhat academic nature of much of this book which was refreshing and opens it up to a much larger readership. Overall a good book but for reasons I can't quite put my finger on it didn't enthrall me as I thought it would. Still well worth trying though.

[Karl Steel · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably the best psychoanalytic/cultural studies book on skin available. Psychoanalytic critique isn't doing it for me anymore, so I didn't finish, but I still recommend this. NB: Connor's a very good writer.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Locates an inquiry into embodiment at the level of the epidermis, that liminal zone in which self and world cross paths. Theories of stigmata, tattoos and the history of scientific inquiry into the skin.

[Renata · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nojinho.