Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies

by Peter J. Capuano (Editor), Sue Zemka (Editor)

Overview

Until recently, the embodied hand has paradoxically escaped the notice of nineteenth-century cultural and literary historians precisely because of its centrality. The essays in Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka’s new collection, Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies, join an emerging body of work that seeks to remedy this. Casting new light on an array of well-known authors—Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde—the volume explores the role of the hand as a nexus between culture and physical embodiment. The contributors to this volume address a wide range of manual topics and concerns, including those related to religion, medicine, science, industry, paranormal states, language, digital humanities, law, photography, disability, and art history. Examining hands, language, materiality, and agency, these contributors employ their expertise as Victorianists in order to understand what hands have to tell us about the cultural preoccupations of the nineteenth century and how the unique conditions of Britain at the time shaped the modern emergence of our cultural relationship with our hands.

Contributors
James Eli Adams, Karen Bourrier, Aviva Briefel, Peter J. Capuano, Jonathan Cheng, Kate Flint, Pamela K. Gilbert, Tamara Ketabgian, J. Hillis Miller, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Daniel A. Novak, Julianne Smith, Herbert F. Tucker, and Sue Zemka
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814257685
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	09/09/2024
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter J. Capuano is Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body.
Sue Zemka is Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society.
 

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction    Handling Flesh and Metaphor

            Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka

Part I   Hands: Whole and Part

Chapter 1        The Anatomy of Anglican Industry: Mechanical Philosophy and Early Factory Fiction

            Peter J. Capuano

Chapter 2        Lost Hands and Prosthetic Narratives: William Dodd, Writing at the Industrial Join

            Tamara Ketabgian

Chapter 3        “A fiery hand gripped my vitals”: Admiral Nelson, Amputation, and Heroic Masculinity in Jane Eyre

            Karen Bourrier

Part II  Hands, Plot, and Character

Chapter 4        Hands and the Will in The Woman in White

            Pamela K. Gilbert

Chapter 5

Hands at a Séance: Manual Evidence in Victorian Spiritualism and the Ghost Story

            Aviva Briefel

Chapter 6        Hands and Minds in The Moonstone

            Sue Zemka

Chapter 7        The Dead Hand: George Eliot and the Burdens of Inheritance

            James Eli Adams

Chapter 8        Computation and the Gendering of Gestures

            Jonathan Cheng

Part III Framing and Staging Hands

Chapter 9        The Photographer’s Hand

            Kate Flint

Chapter 10      Staged Hands in Bleak House

            Julianne Smith

Part IV Manual Exceptionalism in Later Victorian Literature and Culture

Chapter 11      Handling Private Dramas of Class and Gender in Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children

            Deborah Denenholz Morse

Chapter 12      Reading by Hand: Oscar Wilde and the Body in the Archive

            Daniel A. Novak

Chapter 13      Hands in Hardy and James

            J. Hillis Miller

Part V  Afterword

The Well Spoken Hand

            Herbert F. Tucker

List of Contributors

Index

 

Editorial Reviews

This collection is as much a call to action on what scholarship is or can be as it is a specific treatment of hands . . . itself an experiment in how many approaches to a topic can meet in a single collection . . . Victorian Hands adds yet another join to the hand as tool; it provides a new model for how to manufacture work across a broad scholarly community.” —Tobias Wilson-Bates, Victorian Studies 

From the Publisher