{"product_id":"dead-hands-9780804733854","title":"Dead Hands","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDead Hands\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" -- \u003ci\u003eModern Philology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Rowe] offers. . . . theoretical eclecticism, meticulous research, and careful attention to texts to yield original and nuanced readings of agency in process.\" -- \u003ci\u003eModern Philology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eList 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Stanford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49405530833239,"sku":"9780804733854","price":56.1,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780804733854.jpg?v=1730492748","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/dead-hands-9780804733854","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}