Description
Book SynopsisAnalyses how Victorians used the pathology of disease to express deep-seated anxieties about a rapidly industrialising England's relationship to the material world. Drawing on medicine, literature, political economy, sociology, anthropology, and popular advertising, the author explores the industrial logic of disease.
Trade Review“
Raw Material adds much to the existing literature on the Victorians. With its enlightening case studies and its author’s solid understanding of the state of medical art in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this is a first-rate piece of work.”—Sander L. Gilman, author of
Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery“Industry makes it possible to understand the Victorian body, according to Erin O'Connor, as so much raw material. O'Connor's mind is a pleasure to watch at work and
Raw Material will make a significant contribution to Victorian studies, to work on the body, and to cultural studies.”—Mary Ann O'Farrell, author of
Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush“The body in distress and deformation—black from cholera, excrescent from breast cancer, monstrous, and repaired through prosthesis—offers a prism through which O’Connor refracts the crisis of the self in the world’s first industrial society. This is a complex, empirically rich, reflective and vigorously argued book that will be welcomed by literary critics, by historians of the body and of the nineteenth century, and by anyone engaged with cultural theory.”—Thomas Laqueur, author of
Making Sex : Body and Gender from the Greeks to FreudTable of ContentsList of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
ONE/ Asiatic Cholera and the Raw Material of Race 21
TWO/ Breast Reductions 60
THREE/ Fractions of Men: Engendering Amputation 102
FOUR/ Monsters. Materials, Methods 148
AFTERWORD/ The Promises of Monsters, or, A Manifesto for Academic Futures 209
Notes 219
Works Cited 251
Index 267
