Focusing on tears and a variety of other bodily fluids, this book selectively examines how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders over a span of approximately 300 years.

Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature. Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite – closure, containment and stoniness – and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which ‘female’ porosity and ‘manly’ stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity. This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and ‘feminine’ genres, such as ‘sloppy’ letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.

"Lennartz provides a fascinating, hyper-focused close re-reading of a host of canonical texts spanning roughly three hundred years ... [The book] pays unflinching attention to the liquid grotesque in the canon and provides an explicit treatment of the body and its leakiness without resorting to ‘metaphorical fig leaves’ or the stony limitations of chronology." - Literature & History