Comparative Cultural Representational Study on the Reciprocity of the Spirit and the Body in English Literature

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The purpose of this project to explore how the discourse and concept of 'representations of the physical and the mental ' have been formed and transformed in the English literature from the late Medieval to this century, and, with a view to the specific writers and their writings, we analyzed the following various aspects of both the mind and the body : their imagery, their interrelations, their genealogy, their destinations, and their cultural qualities. To begin with, based on the Shakespearean sense of the body, we explored the relations between the physical and the mental in the English Renaissance. By confirming the influences of the Cartesian dichotomy on European discourses, and by introducing the concept of performance, we came to acknowledge similarities between the eastern physically and the western spirituality. Despite the difficulties of fusing the eastern physically and the western spirituality, we came to notice the increasing to the eastern mind-body relations in the ever-changing modern society in which the "cultural qualities" have to shift because of its multi-cultural exchanges. For the problems of discrepancies between the mind-body relations and their representaions, one has to survey each example in such various genres, but as a whole one may say that the convolution of various cultures may produce new representations of the mind-body relations. Therefore, in analyzing various cultural representations, those researchers with a background different from that of the research subject, may produce new representations of the mind-body relations. Therefore, in analyzing various cultural representations, those researchers with a background different from that of the research subject, may produce a fresh viewpoint because of the difference. The importance of mixing cultures may be confirmed by the fact that the very period in which Shakespeare wrote his plays was no other than such a culturally revolutionary period.