Victorian Skin , livre ebook

449

pages

English

Ebooks

2019

Écrit par
K. Gilbert Pamela

Publié par
Cornell University Press

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449

pages

English

Ebooks

2019

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Cornell University Press

Date de parution

15 mars 2019

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781501731600

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

9 Mo

In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other''s feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify?

As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others.

Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.

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Publié par

Cornell University Press

Date de parution

15 mars 2019

EAN13

9781501731600

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

9 Mo

q VICTORIAN SKIN

VICTORIAN SKIN SURFACE , SE L F, HI STORY n Pa m e l a K . G i l b e r t

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2019 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: A CIP data record is available from the Library of Congress.

“Signs of syphilis on the site of a tattoo.” Illustration to “Notes of Cases on an Outbreak of Syphilis following on Tattooing,”British Medical Journal(May 4, 1889). Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images: images@wellcome. ac.uk. Copyrighted work available under Creative Com mons Attribution only license CC BY 4.0.

q Co nte nts

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

Pa r t I . Th e S e l f a s S u r f a c e 1. Sense 2. Expression Pa r t I I . P e r m e a b i l i t y 3. Out 4. In Pa r t I I I . A l i e n at e d a n d A l i e n at i n g 5. Flayed 6. Flaying Pa r t I V. I n s c r i p t i o n s 7. Marked 8. Tattoo Conclusion

Notes 361 Works Cited 397 Index 417

25 63

107 141

181 230

279 318 350

q I l lu s t r at i o n s

1.1. Bell,ExpressionAnatomy and Philosophy of (1824), “Plate One: Being a View of the Nerves of the Head” 1.2. Bell,ExpressionAnatomy of (1806), showing “reverent attention with elevation of thought” 1.3. Bell,ExpressionAnatomy of the Muscles(1806), “Plate IV: Of of the Face of Brutes” 3.1. George Henry Fox, “Syphiloderma Tuberculosis,” in Photographic Illustrations of Cutaneous Syphilis(1881), Plate XXV 4.1. JacquesLouis David,The Death of Marat(1793), Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium 4.2. PaulJacquesAimé Baudry,Charlotte Corday(1860), Musée des BeauxArts de Nantes 5.1. French Officer’s Leg Skin (1793), The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh 6.1. Bell,ExpressionAnatomy of (1824), “Crying” [from pain] 6.2. Paul Chenavard,La Divine Tragédie,in the museum catalog Divina Tragedia(between 1865 and 1869), Paris, Musée d’Orsay 6.3. Apollo Flaying Marsyas, detail of Chenavard’sDivina Tragedia, Paris, Musée d’Orsay 7.1. Tom sees himself in the mirror, in Charles Kingsley,The WaterBabies, A Fairy Tale for a LandBaby(1864) 8.1. Tichborne daguerreotype by Thomas Helsby (as published in 1876) 9.1. The “individual ego as a psychical id . . . ,” from Freud’s The Ego and the Id(1923)

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q A c k n o w l e d g m e nt s

As is usual with any large project, I owe thanks to too many people to count. Institutions first: I have relied on the generous assistance and friendly atmosphere of the Wellcome Institute at UCL and the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Senate House Library and Special Collec tions at UCL and the library at the University of Edinburgh, the Anatomical Museum at the University of Edinburgh, as well as Library West at the Uni versity of Florida. I am especially indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University for substantial financial support. Both the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Warwick University provided opportunities for collegial interac tion. Thanks also to the Albert Brick Professorship and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Of my UF colleagues, all of whom are important sources of intellectual stimulation and emotional nurturance, I would like to especially thank Ken neth Kidd, John Leavey, Judith Page, Malini Schueller, Phil Wegner, Melissa Hyde, Sid Dobrin, Robert Thomson, Susan Hegeman, Chris Snodgrass, Stephanie Smith, John Murchek, Jodi Schorb, Kim Emery, Terry Harpold, Apollo Amoko, Leah Rosenberg, Tace Hedrick, Brandon Kershner, Marsha Bryant, and Roger Maioli. Melissa Davis, Kathy Williams, Carla Blount, Jeri White, and the late Janet Moore kept the department—and me—running and (more or less) sane. My colleagues at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell 2016–17 have all contributed materially to this project; I would like to thank Tim Murray, Gloria Kim, Andrea Bachner, Alana Staiti, Stacey Langwick, Kevin Ohi, Samantha Sheppard, Ricardo Wilson, Naminata Dia bate, Nancy Worman, Erik Born, Daniel Smyth, Ricardo A. Wilson II, and Emily Rials, and most particularly Gemma Angel, Elyse Semerdjian, Kar men MacKendrick, Seçil Yilmaz, and Alicia Imperiale for many thoughtful comments and references. Thanks to Elisha Cohn and Ellis Hanson both

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