Representations: Health, Disability, Culture and Society Ser. ; v.8
Print version: Hingston, Kylee-Anne Articulating Bodies Liverpool : Liverpool University Press,c2019 ISBN 9781789620757
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Text as Body and Body as Text: How Literary Form Textually Creates the Body -- Negotiating Victorian Disability -- I. Grotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris -- Hybridity, Disability, and the ’Modern’ Novel -- Focalization: Externally Authoritative or Internally Ambiguous -- Reading Quasimodo: Interpretation or Empathy? -- II. Social Bodies: Dickens and the Disabled Narrator in Bleak House -- Externally Focalizing on the Social Body -- Smallpox and the Esther Industry: Critical Readings of Esther’s Facial Scarring -- Focalization, Form, and the Fractured Self -- ’Shape Structures Story’: The Disabled Narrator -- III. Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone -- The ’Physiological Telegraph’: Genre, Form, and the Body in Aurora Floyd -- Reading Disability and Reading Health -- Destabilizing Normalcy: Focalization, Identity, and the Body in The Moonstone -- Destabilizing Normalcy at the Shivering Sand -- Linearity and Narrative Control of Deviance -- IV. Sanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House -- Individual Incarnation and the Single-Focused Narrative: Disability and Illness in Rose Turquand -- Focalization and the Collective Body -- Communal Incarnation and the Multiple-Focus Narrative: Disability and Illness in The Pillars of the House -- Intellectual Disability, Focalization, and Closure -- V. Fairy-Tale Bodies: Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince -- Prostheticizing Maturity -- Embodied Narrator and Readers -- Focalization and Prosthesis -- VI. Mysterious Bodies: Solving and De-Solving Disability in the Fin-de-Siecle Mystery.
Constructing the Disabled Object: The Scientific Gaze in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde -- Diagnosing Hyde -- Narrative Prosthesis and the Gothic Open Ending -- Detecting Disability: Narrative Structure and Reading the Body in ’The Crooked Man’ -- Detective Fiction’s Drive towards Closure and Cure -- Focalizing Disability’s Shifting Signification -- Afterword -- Works Cited -- Index.
Articulating Bodies shows how Victorian fiction’s narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality..