Body and text in Apuleius's 'The Golden Ass' and Richardson's 'Pamela'

This thesis looks at two works which, though widely separated in time and space, share a fascination with the complex inter-relationships which can exist between body and text. The Golden Ass and Pamela both have protagonists with striking bodies. Lucius suffers because he is imprisoned in a grotesque ass-body which subjects him to a series of misadventures. Pamela suffers because she is trapped in a seductive body which subjects her to her master's unsavoury designs. In both works, the protagonist is intimately associated with text, and eventually finds happiness by resorting to a substitution of literary corpus for physical body.;Composed of two chapters on The Golden Ass, one on Pamela and one on Pamela, Part II, this study does not systematically follow any one critical school, but draws upon the insights of Barthes, Derrida, Genette, Foucault, and psychoanalytic theory in general. The first chapter examines the way the metamorphosis turns Lucius's body into a kind of text, and looks at the formal similarities between Lucius's textual and physical bodies. The second chapter explores Lucius's decision, when faced with a life-threatening prostitution of his asinine body, to offer up his textual body to the public instead. The third chapter shows that a similar sleight-of-hand replaces carnal knowledge with textual knowledge in Pamela: Mr. B. "knows" Pamela by textually raping her. The chapter on Pamela's sequel explores the fact that the natural consequence of this textual rape is textual insemination.;Both The Golden Ass and Pamela revolve around metaphors suggestive of the physicality of text. The former envisages the text as a corpus which, like the human body, can be an object of desire and a source of pleasure. The latter focusses on the word textus, which suggests that the text is as concrete and tangible as a piece of fabric enclosing the body. These metaphors confirm the inextricable linking of body and text in these two works.