Description
Book SynopsisThe hands of colonized subjects were vital sites of fascination and interpretation in late-Victorian imperial narratives. The book considers accounts of fingerprinting, amputation, disease, manual labor, and mummification as central examples of the racial significance assigned to hands around the fin de siècle.
Trade Review'The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination is an essential read for Victorian, Modernist, and even Postmodern and Contemporary scholars. Briefel's excellent book contributes to the fields of hand, literary rape, feminist, postcolonial, and posthuman studies, demanding that we explore the ethical implications of reading the hand in the Victorian imagination as a signifier of either individual or collective identity by contending with questions of race all too often overlooked.' Kimberly Cox, The British Society for Literature and Science Reviews
'… rich, cogent, and eminently readable … Briefel's book is an indispensable part of an emerging area of focus in nineteenth-century studies … Marshaling a rich array of historical, scientific, popular, and literary texts with a deft and restrained critical touch, Briefel has offered the reader a gift - one dropped gently into our hands.' Daniel A. Novak, Novel: A Forum on Fiction
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. The case of the blank hand: race and manual legibility; 2. Potters and prosthetics: putting Indian hands to work; 3. The mummy's hand: art and evolution; 4. A hand for a hand: punishment, responsibility, and imperial desire; 5. Crimes of the hand: manual violence and the Congo; Coda; Bibliography.
