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"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 is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
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.
