Suchergebnisse

In 1866, theAtlantic Monthlypublished a fictional case study of an army surgeon who had lost all of his limbs during the Civil War. Written anonymously by American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, "The Case of George Dedlow" describes not only the series of wounds and infections which led to the amputation of all four of the soldier's arms and legs but also the after-effects of amputation. Reduced to what he terms "a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape," Dedlow finds that in disarticulating his body, amputation articulates anatomical norms. His observation of his own uniquely altered state qualifies him to speak in universal terms about the relationship between sentience and selfhood: "I have dictated these pages," he says, "not to shock my readers, but to possess them with facts in regard to the relation of the mind to the body" (1866:5). As such, the story explores the meaning of embodiment, finding in a fragmented anatomy the opportunity to piece together a more complete understanding of how the body functions—physically and metaphysically—as a whole.

Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1: On Victorian Time Historiographies of Culture -- 1 The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror -- 2 The Legacy of Victorian Spectacle -- Part 2: Victorian Commodities for Postmodern Consumers -- 3 The New Victorians -- 4 More Stories about Clothing and Furniture -- Part 3: The Ways Victorians Live Now -- 5 Wilde Americana -- 6 Victorians on Broadway at the Present Time -- 7 Rounding Up the Usual Suspect -- 8 Legal Uses of Victorian Fic -- 9 "Nurs'd up amongst the scenes I have describ'd" -- 10 Revisiting the Serial Format of Dickens's Novels -- or, Little Dorrit Goes a Long Way -- 11 Disseminating Victorian Culture in the Postmillennial Classroom -- Contributors -- Index.

Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction—the Victorian "fallen woman" represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.