Prosthetic Body Parts In Nineteenth Century Literature And Culture

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.

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture analyses the cultural and literary histories of medicine and mobility as entangled processes whose discourses and practices constituted, influenced, and transformed each other. Presenting case studies of novels, poetry, travel narratives, diaries, ship magazines, skin care manuals, asylum records, press reports, and various other sources, its chapters identify and discuss diverse literary, historical, and cultural texts, contexts, and modes in which medicine and mobility intersected in nineteenth-century Britain, its empire, and beyond, whereby they illustrate how the paradigms of mobility studies and the medical humanities can complement each other.

Offers an authoritative account of literature and medicine at a vital point in their emergence during the nineteenth-century.

Offering an authoritative account of the relationship between literature and medicine between approximately 1800 and 1900, this volume brings together leading scholars in the field to provide a valuable overview of how two dynamic fields influenced and shaped each during a period of revolutionary change. During the nineteenth century, medicine was being redefined as a subject in which experimental methodologies could transform the healing art, and was simultaneously branching off into new specialisms and subdivisions. Questions addressed in this volume include the influence of physics on poetry, the role of medical professionalism in fiction, the cultural and literary representation of sanitation, and the interdisciplinary nature of controversy and negligence. Along with its sister publication, Literature and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, this volume offers a major critical overview of the study of literature and medicine.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

Oral health is integral to wellbeing and quality of life. This important edited volume brings together leading scholars to address global oral health and the multiple ways in which theory, practice and discourse have shaped it in the modern period. Structured around key themes, the book chapters draw on interdisciplinary perspectives in order to consider the role of the dental profession, the commercial sector, charities, the state, the media and patients in shaping oral health in the past and present. Collectively, the chapters consider the extent to which each of the studied groups and actors have sought to own and control the mouth. By adopting multiple perspectives, the book highlights the importance of cross-disciplinary work across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and provides a road map for a new interdisciplinary field focused on oral health and society. Drawing on perspectives from dentistry, sociology, history and the wider humanities, this book will interest students and researchers of dentistry, public health, sociology of health and illness, the medical humanities and history.

The story of William Waters, Black street performer in Regency London, and how his huge celebrity took on a life of its own Every child in Regency London knew Billy Waters, the celebrated “King of the Beggars.” Likely born into enslavement in 1770s New York, he became a Royal Navy sailor. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented and irrepressible Waters became London’s most famous street performer. His extravagantly costumed image blazed across the stage and in print to an unprecedented degree. For all his contemporary renown, Waters died destitute in 1823—but his legend would live on for decades. Mary L. Shannon’s biography draws together surviving traces of Waters’ life to bring us closer to the historical figure underlying them. Considering Waters’ influence on the London stage and his echoing resonances in visual art, and writing by Douglass, Dickens, and Thackeray, Shannon asks us to reconsider Black presences in nineteenth-century popular culture. This is a vital attempt to recover a life from historical obscurity—and a fascinating account of what it meant to find fame in the Regency metropolis.

This is the first full-length study of spectacles in the Victorian period. It examines how the Victorians shaped our understanding of functional visual capacity and the concept of 20:20 vision. Demonstrating how this unique assistive device can connect the histories of medicine, technology and disability, it charts how technology has influenced our understanding of sensory perception, both through the diagnostic methods used to measure visual impairment and the utility of spectacles to ameliorate its effects. Taking a material culture approach, the book assesses how the design of spectacles thwarted ophthalmologists’ attempts to medicalise their distribution and use, as well as creating a mainstream marketable device on the high street.

This book provides fresh perspectives on the object world, embodied experience and materiality in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Contributors explore canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens and James, alongside less-familiar texts and a range of objects including nineteenth-century automata, scrapbooks, museum exhibits and antiques.

The long 19th century-stretching from the start of the American Revolution in 1776 to the end of World War I in 1918-was a pivotal period in the history of disability for the Western world and the cultures under its imperial sway. Industrialization was a major factor in the changing landscape of disability, providing new adaptive technologies and means of access while simultaneously contributing to the creation of a mass-produced environment hostile to bodies and minds that did not adhere to emerging norms. In defining disability, medical views, which framed disabilities as problems to be solved, competed with discourses from such diverse realms as religion, entertainment, education, and literature. Disabled writers and activists generated important counternarratives, made increasingly available through the spread of print culture. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of history, literature, culture and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century includes chapters on atypical bodies, mobility impairment, chronic pain and illness, blindness, deafness, speech dysfluencies, learning difficulties, and mental health, with 37 illustrations drawn from period sources.