Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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This open access book investigates imaginaries of artificial limbs, eyes, hair, and teeth in British and American literary and cultural sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture shows how depictions of prostheses complicated the contemporary bodily status quo, which increasingly demanded an appearance of physical wholeness. Revealing how representations of the prostheticized body were inflected significantly by factors such as social class, gender, and age, Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture argues that nineteenth-century prosthesis narratives, though presented in a predominantly ableist and sometimes disablist manner, challenged the dominance of physical completeness as they questioned the logic of prostheticization or presented non-normative subjects in threateningly powerful ways. Considering texts by authors including Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle alongside various cultural, medical, and commercial materials, this book provides an important reappraisal of historical attitudes to not only prostheses but also concepts of physical normalcy and difference.

Author(s): Ryan Sweet
Series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021

Language: English
Pages: 298
City: Cham

Acknowledgements
Professional and Personal
Reuse of Copyrighted Material
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Structure
Scope
Critical Contexts
Language
References
Chapter 2: Constructing and Complicating Physical Wholeness
Cultivating Completeness
Theories of Body and Mind
Legal and Social Factors
Literatures of Loss
Persuasive Prosthetists
References
Chapter 3: “The Infurnal Thing”: Autonomy and Ability in Narratives of Disabling, Self-acting, and Weaponized Prostheses
Human-Machine Minds and Bodies
Productive Prostheses
Disabling Devices
Prostheses as Weapons
Self-acting Prostheses
References
Chapter 4: Mobilities: Physical and Social
Mendicity Versus Mendacity
The Peg Versus the Artificial Leg
Prosthesis Users in Dickens’s Journals
Our Mutual Friend
Wegg’s Legacy
References
Chapter 5: “Losing a Leg to Gain a Wife”: Marriage, Gender, and the Prosthetic Body Part
Gendered Difference
Prostheses in the Marriage Plot
“False” Females
Marriageable Men?
“Love Which Conquers All Reversals and Disabilities”
Enticing Devices
Prosthetic Matches
Countering Concealment
References
Chapter 6: Signs of Decline? Prostheses and the Ageing Subject
Attitudes to Ageing
Vanity and Calamity
False Part, Flawed Whole
Losing One’s Wig
Dazzling Devices and Unlikely Heroes
References
Chapter 7: Conclusion
References
Index