Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to ModernDead Hands 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. The 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 chilling effect. Across such disparate fields, the author argues, the figure of the "dead hand" represents a specific set of ideas about human agency: particularly, concerns about the fraught relationship between intentions (individual and collective) and meaningful action in the world. Severed and wandering, fictional dead hands challenge prevailing assumptions about bodily autonomy and control, directing us instead to the dependent, disabling, and self-alienating experiences of the acting self. In the process, they illuminate the changing assumptions about bodily experience that "sense" of acting self that sustain legal and political definitions of person in these different periods. Outlining the dynamic history of this device first as it migrates from visual art onto the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and later as it prospers in Anglo-American gothic fiction Dead Hands advances a comparatist reading of early modern and modern concepts of bodily action and its relation to interiority, authority, and identity. |
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Contents
Portrait of Vesalius | 1 |
Engraving of the flexormuscles and tendons of the forearm | 2 |
Detail from an abdominal illustration | 3 |
Armorial Bearings of the Royal College of Physicians | 4 |
Gods Handy Worke | 24 |
Dismembering and Forgetting | 52 |
S Without all falshood or deceit | 61 |
Non sine causa 1557 | 62 |
Action at a Distance | 86 |
Gothic Labor | 111 |
Puddnhead Wilson | 160 |
Detail from Genealogies of the Holy Scriptures 12 Illustration from La Main 13 The West Case | 164 |
Konais Hand | 168 |
Notes | 211 |
Bibliography | 235 |
| 253 | |
Common terms and phrases
action agency agent analysis anatomy Andronicus appears associated authority become begins body central century character cited complex connection contemporary context continues contract conventions dead hand defined depends describes dissection draws early effect emblem emerges English evidence example experience fiction figure fingerprints fingers force gesture ghost give Gothic grasp haunting human Identification identity individual intention interest John kind labor later living logic London look Main manual marks material means mechanical moral narrative nature notion object offers particular performance period person physical play political practice Press prints problem produce question records relations represent response rhetorical role scene seems sense servants severed social stage story suggests symbolic tells theory things tion Titus touch tradition trope turn Twain University West whole Wilson writing
Bibliographic information
| Title | Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern |
| Author | Katherine Rowe |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Stanford University Press, 1999 |
| ISBN | 0804733856, 9780804733854 |
| Length | 267 pages |
| Subjects | › › Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |