Description
Book SynopsisDead Hands traces the fascinating career of a curious imaginative device: the wandering, disembodied, or ghostly hand. The author situates this familiar gothic convention in its richer literary and intellectual contexts, from early modern English drama through American fiction. Dexterously threading historical, theoretical, and formalist questions through readings of the plays of Shakespeare and Webster and the haunted tales of Maupassant, Le Fanu, and Twain, the book illuminates the complex social fictions invested in the faculties of the hand and tested by this evocative device.
The book brings together a broad and eclectic array of manual iconography: from sixteenth-century religious imagery, medical anatomies, emblem books, witchcraft and folklore, to the popular metaphors of nineteenth-century industrialism, contemporary labor movements, and forensic science. Literary dead hands draw on and elaborate these varied traditions, to sometimes humorous and sometimes chil
Trade Review
"A series of richly historicized readings which highlight multiplicity, complexity, and ironic self-questioning rather than adherence to a uniform and culturally determined version of the self." -- Modern Philology
"[Rowe] offers. . . . theoretical eclecticism, meticulous research, and careful attention to texts to yield original and nuanced readings of agency in process." -- Modern Philology
Table of Contents
List of illustrations Preface Introduction: essentialism, agency and the exemplary hand 1. Divine complicity: God's handy worke and the anatomist's touch 2. Effectless use: dismembering and forgetting in Titus Andronicus 3. That curious engine: action at a distance in The Duchess of Malfi 4. The beast with five fingers: gothic labor relations in Victorian ghost stories 5. Involuntary confession: Pudd'nhead Wilson and law-enforcement mythology Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index.
