The limits of the human : fictions of anomaly, race, and gender in the long eighteenth century / Felicity A. Nussbaum.

  • Nussbaum, Felicity.
Date:
2003
  • Books

About this work

Description

"Felicity Nussbaum examines literary and cultural representation of human difference in England and its empire during the long eighteenth century. With a special focus on women's writing, she analyzes canonical and lesser-known novels and plays from the Restoration to abolition. She considers a range of anomalies (defects, disease, and disability) as they intermingle with ideas of a racial femininity and masculinity to define "normalcy" as national identity. Incorporating writings by Behn, Burney, and the Bluestockings - as well as Southerne, Shaftesbury, Johnson, Sterne, and Equiano - Nussbaum treats a range of disabilities - being mute, blind, lame - and physical oddities such as eunuchism and giantism. She shows that these corporeal features, perceived as aberrant and extraordinary, combine in the popular imagination to reveal a repertory of differences located between the extremes of splendid and horrid novelty."--Jacket.

Publication/Creation

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Physical description

xii, 336 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (p. 299-318) and index.

Contents

Introduction: monstrous tales -- Fictions of defect: Alphra Behn and Eliza Haywood -- Effeminancy and femininity: Sarah Fielding, Elizabeth Montagu, and Johnson -- Odd women, mangled men: the bluestockings and Sterne -- Scarred women: Frances Burney and smallpox -- Racial femininity: "our British fair" -- Black women: why Imoinda turns white -- Black men: Equiano, Sancho, and being a man -- Black parts: racial counterfeit on stage -- Coda: between races.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    NH.W.AA7
    Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 0521811678
  • 9780521811675
  • 0521016428
  • 9780521016421