Defects: Engendering the Modern Body

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University of Michigan Press, 2000 - Literary Criticism - 332 pages
"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. Contributors include Barbara Benedict, Jill Campbell, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Lennard Davis, Helen Deutsch, Robert Jones, Cora Kaplan, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Felicity Nussbaum, Stephen Pender, and Joel Reed.
Helen Deutsch is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture. Felicity Nussbaum is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narrative.

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Contents

Introduction
1
Fictions of Defect
31
Dr Johnson Amelia and the Discourse of Disability in the Eighteenth Century
54
Conversations between the Deaf the Hard of Hearing and Others
75
Human Exhibition in Early Modern England
95
Socializing Sexuality and the Monster of 1790
127
Representing the National Body in EighteenthCentury Ireland
154
The Case of Dr Johnson
177
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Glass Reversd of Female Old Age
213
EighteenthCentury Botany and the Modern Gendered Subject
252
The Virtue of Deformity in Sarah Scotts Fiction
280
Liberalism Feminism and Defect
303
Contributors
319
Index
323
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