The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 5/15/2003
EAN 9780521811675, ISBN10: 0521811678
Hardcover, 350 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
In this book, Felicity Nussbaum examines literary and cultural representations of human difference in England and its empire during the long eighteenth century. With a special focus on women's writing, Nussbaum 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 femininity, masculinity, and race 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 as they are inflected by emerging notions of a racial femininity and masculinity. 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.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
monstrous tales
Part I. Anomaly and Gender
1. Fictions of defect
Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood
2. Effeminacy and femininity
Sarah Fielding, Elizabeth Montagu, and Johnson
3. Odd women, mangled men
the bluestockings and Sterne
4. Scarred women
Frances Burney and smallpox
Part II. Race and Gender
5. Racial femininity
'Our British Fair'
6. Black women
why Imoinda turns white
7. Black men
Equiano, Sancho, and being a man
8. Black parts
racial counterfeit on stage
Coda
between races.