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

Capuano, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472052845 ISBN 13: 9780472052844

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Peter J. Capuano is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a faculty member of the University of California's Dickens Project.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472052845
• ISBN 13: 9780472052844
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 340