|
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
|
Buy Now
Dead Hands - Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,636
Discovery Miles 16 360
|
|
|
Dead Hands - Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
"Dead 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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(2)
(4)
