Defects: Engendering the Modern Body"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. |
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 |
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Agreeable Ugliness Alexander Pope Amelia Anglo-Irish Aphra Behn appearance argued beauty become body Boswell Boswell's botany Boyle Cambridge century character conjoined twins contemporary couplet cultural curiosity Darwin deaf deaf culture defect deformity desire difference disability discourse display distinction early modern eighteenth eighteenth-century England English essay eunuch example eyes face femininity figure gender Grigely Helen Deutsch Henry Fielding hermaphrodites human exhibition identity imagined James Jane Eyre John Lady Mary Wortley Lady Mary's Linnaeus's literary London Lorraine Daston male Mary Wortley Montagu Michel Foucault Millenium Hall monsters monstrous birth moral narrative narrator nature novel Oxford person Philosophical physical plant plant sexuality poem political Pope Pope's portrait prodigies relations Reynolds Robert Robert Boyle Royal Society Samuel Johnson satire scientific Scott's sign language smallpox Smith social suggests tics tion trans University Press virtue woman women writing York