Description: Christ's Subversive Body is a fascinating work of comparative literature that examines six historical examples of politically or culturally subversive usages of the body of Christ. Examples include works by Epiphanius, Lavater, Dostoevsky, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and from the theoconservative discourse in the United States.
Review Quotes: "Anyone who was raised, as I was, in the Roman Catholic religion, will recall those weekly ritual moments when the priest intones the words, 'the body of Christ, ' as a wafer is placed gently on one's outstretched tongue. Olga Solovieva's masterful study of Christ's 'subversive body' reveals just how much mystery, complexity, and magic was baked into those words and that wafer. Deeply learned, beautifully written, and strikingly original, Solovieva's book will remain an essential text for the study of Christianity in its theological, literary, and political dimensions." --W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race and What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives And Loves of Images
"By tracing... various historical ideologies to the Pauline origin of their rhetorical formation Solovieva re-exposes the shape of the subversive discourse that both triggered their emergence and was covered over by them. --Eyal Peretz, Indiana University Bloomington