"Physiognomy in Profile affirms and assesses Lavater's contribution to European culture in the two hundred years after his death. It examines how Lavater's vision of physiognomy as a viable method of interpreting the modern world has been repeatedly affirmed and challenged. Previous monographs on Lavater have tended to focus on one particular theme, discipline, or historical period, but this study deliberately adopts a cross-disciplinary approach, and covers a broad historical time frame. Some widely different material is juxtaposed (painting, photography, fiction, journalism, medical texts) in order to explore recurring issues in physiognomical thought." "Essays are arranged in chronological order so that the reader can gain a sense of the shared preoccupations of Lavater's contemporaries and successors. But the book may also be read thematically."--BOOK JACKET.

As a boy traveling to school by streetcar, Norbert Glas often passed the time by studying the faces of his fellow passengers, pondering the significance of the shapes and contours of their noses, eyes, and mouths. Later in life, after becoming a medical doctor and a student of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, Glas gained greater insight into the mysteries of human physiognomy. In Reading the Face, the first translation into English of his seminal work, Glas begins by defining the three parts of the human face and explaining the importance of their relative proportions. A face that is more pronounced in any of these areas tends to indicate certain personality traits and specific physiological characteristics. People with a strong mouth and chin, for example, tend to have a strong will and an active, driven, and assertive nature. With the help of many photos and drawings, Glas presents the physiognomy of three basic types and analyses the specifics of the head, forehead, ears, eyes, mouth, and nose. Reading the Face will be valuable to doctors, teachers, and anyone who wants to better understand, accept, and love others.

When nineteenth-century Londoners looked at each other, what did they see, and how did they want to be seen? Sharrona Pearl reveals the way that physiognomy, the study of facial features and their relationship to character, shaped the way that people understood one another and presented themselves. Physiognomy was initially a practice used to get information about others, but soon became a way to self-consciously give information--on stage, in print, in images, in research, and especially on the street. Moving through a wide range of media, Pearl shows how physiognomical notions rested on instinct and honed a kind of shared subjectivity. She looks at the stakes for framing physiognomy--a practice with a long history--as a science in the nineteenth century. By showing how physiognomy gave people permission to judge others, Pearl holds up a mirror both to Victorian times and our own.

In the Well-Built City, Master Drachton Below's power is absolute, and he will not hesitate to use it. His primary method of control is through his physiognomists, who are trained to read a person's face and body, perceiving that person's past and secrets-and even events yet to come. These seers are the judges and jury. Now Drachton has found something that could extend his reign for eternity: a fruit that bestows immortality. To investigate its whereabouts, Below sends cold, collected physiognomist Cley to the remote mining town of Anamasobia. One at a time Cley interrogates the townspeople, performing his usual fact finding without issue. That is, until he meets the beautiful and bright Arla, who harbors a secret that could potentially turn Cley's world upside down-and topple the Well-Built City itself. A Kafkaesque journey into the unknown, The Physiognomy is an award-winning trip through a land where the line between reality and imagination is constantly blurred.

"William Blake never travelled to the continent, yet his creation myth is far more European than has ever been acknowledged. The painter Henry Fuseli introduced Blake to traditional European thinking, and Blake responded to late 18th century body-theory in his Urizen books (1794-95), which emerged from his professional work as a copy-engraver on Henry Hunter's translation of Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1789-98). Lavater's work contains hundreds of portraits and their physiognomical readings. Blake, Fuseli, Joshua Reynolds and their contemporaries took a keen interest in the ideas behind physiognomy in their search for the right balance between good likeness and type in portraits. Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy demonstrates how the problems occurring during the production of the Hunter translation resonate in Blake's treatment of the Genesis story. Blake takes us back to the creation of the human body, and interrogates the idea that 'God created man after his own likeness.' He introduces the 'Net of Religion', a device which presses the human form into material shape, giving it personality and identity. As Erle shows, Blake's startlingly original take on the creation myth is informed by Lavater's pursuit of physiognomy: the search for divine likeness, traced in the faces of their contemporary men."