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:	09/16/2024
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


“Victorian Hands promises to become an oft-referenced work in Victorian, body, and disability studies. Its through-line is a deep concern with the individual. What it means to be human, especially rejiggered in the face of human exceptionalism’s expiration date, will keep this collection’s readers thinking.” —Barbara Black, author of Hotel London


“Victorian Hands tells a remarkable story about the meaning and matter of the human hand. It touches on manual labor, tactile sensation, the materiality of writing, and the embodiment of agency, among many other innovative topics. For anyone interested in figural representation, this book illuminates the hand’s extraordinary capacities as both agent and object.” —William A. Cohen

From the Publisher