Raw Material - Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture

"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 Freud"

List of contents

List 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

About the author

Erin O'Connor

Summary

Analyses 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.

Product details

• Authors: Erin O'Connor, Erin O'Conner, Erin O'Connor
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.12.2000
• EAN: 9780822326083
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-2608-3
• No. of pages: 288
• Weight: 667 g
• Illustrations: 50 b&w photographs
• Series: Body, Commodity, Text; Body, Commodity, Text: Studies; Body, Commodity, Text
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Modern era up to 1918; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; Englisch, England, 19. Jahrhundert (1800 bis 1899 n. Chr.), Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte, Europäische Geschichte, Geschichte der Medizin, Geschichte allgemein und Weltgeschichte