Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body

Description

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. Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: The Half-Lives of Hands Part I: Maneuvering Through Natural Theology and Industry Chapter 1. Shifting from Gaze to Grasp: “Odious Handywork” in Frankenstein Chapter 2. The Anatomy of Anglican Industry: Mechanical Philosophy and Early Factory Fiction Part II: Manufacturing and Manipulating the Separate Spheres of Gender Chapter 3. Luddism, Needlework, and the Seams of Domesticity in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley Chapter 4. Etiquette and Upper-Handedness in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair Part III: Handling the Perceptual Politics of Identity after Darwin Chapter 5. The Evolutionary Moment in Dickens’s Great Expectations Chapter 6. Racial Science and the Kabbalah in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Part IV: Plotting the Novelty of Manual Narratives Chapter 7. Handwriting and the Hermeneutics of Detectionin Dickens’s Bleak House Chapter 8. Narrative Red-Handedness in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Conclusion: The Victorians, the Twentieth Century, and Our Digital Present Notes Bibliography Index