Changing hands : industry, evolution, and the reconfiguration of the Victorian body / Peter J. Capuano.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Capuano, Peter J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Human body in literature.

Literature and society--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

Great Britain.

History.

Mind and body in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

xv, 323 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2015]

Summary:

In Changing Hands, Peter J. Capuano sifts through Victorian literature and culture for changes in the way the human body is imagined in the face of urgent questions about creation, labor, gender, class, and racial categorization, using "hands" (the "distinguishing mark of ... humanity") as the primary point of reference. Capuano complicates his study by situating the historical argument in the context of questions about the disappearance of hands during the twentieth century into the haze of figurative meaning. Out of this curious aporia, Capuano exposes a powerful, "embodied handedness" as the historical basis for many of the uncritically metaphoric, metonymic, and/or ideogrammatic approaches to the study of the human body in recent critical discourse. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Maneuvering Through Natural Theology and Industry

Chapter 1 Shifting from Gaze to Grasp: "Odious Handy work" in Frankenstein 19

Chapter 2 The Anatomy of Anglican Industry: Mechanical Philosophy and Early Factory Fiction 42

Part III Manufacturing and Manipulating the Separate Spheres of Gender

Chapter 3 Luddism, Needlework, and the Seams of Domesticity in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley 69

Chapter 4 Etiquette and Upper-Handedness in William Thackeray's Vanity Fair 89

Part III Handling the Perceptual Politics of Identity after Darwin

Chapter 5 The Evolutionary Moment in Dickens's Great Expectations 127

Chapter 6 Racial Science and the Kabbalah in Eliot's Daniel Deronda 152

Part IV Plotting the Novelty of Manual Narratives

Chapter 7 Handwriting and the Hermeneutics of Detection in Dickens's Bleak House 185

Chapter 8 Narrative Red-Handedness in Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 214.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-316) and index.

ISBN:

9780472072842

0472072846

9780472052844

0472052845

0472121405

9780472121403

OCLC:

907059986