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

InChanging 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.

A new imagining of human hands as physical objects and literal representations in Victorian fiction

Peter J. Capuanois 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.

Shortlisted: British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) 2015 Book Award