Defects: engendering the modern body

by Deutsch, Helen Nussbaum, Felicity

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Title Statements

Full title :Defects : engendering the modern body / Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, editors.

Summary

"Defects" brings together essays on the emergence of the concept of monstrosity in the eighteenth century and the ways it paralleled the emergence of notions of sexual difference. Women, declared a mid-eighteenth-century vindication, have been regarded since Aristotle as deformed amphibious things, "neither more or less than Monsters" (Beauty's Triumph 1758). This alliance of monstrosity with misogyny, along with the definition of sexual difference as aberration, is the starting point for this volume's investigation of monstrosity's cultural work in the eighteenth century and its simultaneous mapping and troubling of the range of differences. This collection investigates the conceptual and geographical mapping of early modern and Enlightenment ideas of monstrosity onto a range of differences that contested established categories. The essays consider the representations and material dimensions of phenomena as diverse as femininity and disfigurement, the material imagination and monstrous birth, ugliness as an aesthetic category, deafness and theories of sign language, and the exotic, racialized deformed. Collectively, they demonstrate that the emergence of sexual difference is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of a category of the human that is imagined and deformed, monstrous, and ugly. -- Amazon.com.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:©2000.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):University of Michigan Press
Place of Publication:Ann Arbor
Language:eng
Publication Date:©2000.

The Physical Object

Description:x, 332 pages : : illustrations ; : 24 cm

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:0472096982, 9780472096985, 0472066986, 9780472066988
oclc:ocm41940076
LC Classification:HV1568.25.G7
Dewey Decimal:362.4/0941

pt. 1. Disability -- Dumb Virgins, Blind Ladies, and Eunuchs: Fictions of Defect / Felicity Nussbaum -- Dr. Johnson, Amelia, and the Discourse of Disability in the Eighteenth Century / Lennard J. Davis -- Paper, Picture, Sign: Conversations between the Deaf, the Hard of Hearing, and Others / Nicholas Mirzoeff -- pt. 2. Monstrosity -- In the Bodyshop: Human Exhibition in Early Modern England / Stephen Pender -- Making a Monster: Socializing Sexuality and the Monster of 1790 / Barbara M. Benedict -- Monstrous Knowledge: Representing the National Body in Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Joel Reed -- The Author as Monster: The Case of Dr. Johnson / Helen Deutsch -- pt. 3. Imperfections -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the "Glass Revers'd" of Female Old Age / Jill Campbell -- "Perfect" Flowers, Monstrous Women: Eighteenth-Century Botany and the Modern Gendered Subject / Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook -- Obedient Faces: The Virtue of Deformity in Sarah Scott's Fiction / Robert W. Jones -- Afterword: Liberalism, Feminism, and Defect / Cora Kaplan.

Subjects

Afwijkingen Aufsatzsammlung Culturele aspecten Disability Studies Disability studies -- History -- 17th c… Disability studies -- History -- 17th c… Disability studies -- History -- 18th c… Disability studies -- History -- 18th c… Disabled Persons -- history Études sur le handicap -- Histoire -- 1… Études sur le handicap -- Histoire -- 1… Études sur le handicap -- Histoire -- 1… Études sur le handicap -- Histoire -- 1… France Frankreich Gebreken Geistesgeschichte 1700-1900 Great Britain Grossbritannien History