"This cultural study examines the relations among self-consciousness, subjectivity, and skin from the eighteenth century to the present. Claudia Benthien argues that despite medicine's having penetrated the bodily surface and exposed the interior of the body as never before, skin, paradoxically, has become a more and more unyielding symbol.

She also examines the changing significance of skin through brilliant analyses of art, philosophy, and anatomical drawings and writings, as well as Germanic, American, and African American literature. Benthien discusses the semantic and psychic aspects of touching, feeling, and intellectual perception; the motifs of perforated, armored, or transparent skin; and much more through close readings of such authors as Kleist, Buchner, Hawthorne, Balzac, Rilke, Kafka, Plath, Morrison, Wideman, and Ondaatje.

Myriad images from the Renaissance, anatomy books, and contemporary visual and performance art enhance the text."--BOOK JACKET.