Printing the Other Victorians: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Embodiment and Identity
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Date
2019-09-18
Authors
Floyd, Courtney
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The body was, in many ways, just as imagined as the community in the nineteenth-century. This dissertation bridges the fields of Victorian literature, print culture, and disability studies to demonstrate that print and its attendant technologies allowed Victorians to imagine and define the “normal” body in contradistinction to various Othered embodiments. Scholars have long posited that novels powerfully enabled and informed political and national identities in (and before) the nineteenth century. More recently, critical disability studies scholars have illuminated the ways in which novels also enable and inform concepts about bodily normalcy and ability—not only via the representation of disabled characters, but also through such mechanisms as genre conventions and audience expectations. My analysis of the novels of Wilkie Collins, Richard Marsh, Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot illustrates how Victorian print forms and technologies such as newspapers, advertisements, and personal archives helped generate and disseminate notions of bodily “normalcy” and identity in their form and content. In so doing, my project challenges preconceptions about whose bodies and identities received privileged representation in Victorian media culture, tracing a broader history of representation in Victorian society—one which includes the disabled, the gender non-conforming, and racial and sexual Others, the representations of whose lived experiences Foucault infamously gave up for lost in his introduction to The History of Sexuality.
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Keywords
Archival Theory, Digital Humanities, Periodical Studies, Print Culture, Victorian literature and culture