Many materials of contemporary interest, such as gels, biological tissues and
elastomers, are easily deformed but essentially incompressible. Traditional
linear theory of elasticity implements incompressibility only to first order
and thus permits some volume changes, which become problematically large even
at very small strains. Using a mixed coordinate transformation originally due
to Gauss, we enforce the constraint of isochoric deformations exactly to
develop a linear theory with perfect volume conservation that remains valid
until strains become geometrically large. We demonstrate the utility of this
approach by calculating the response of an infinite soft isochoric solid to a
point force that leads to a nonlinear generalization of the Kelvin solution.
Our approach naturally generalizes to a range of problems involving
deformations of soft solids and interfaces in 2 dimensional and axisymmetric
geometries, which we exemplify by determining the solution to a distributed
load that mimics muscular contraction within the bulk of a soft solid
