|
The Body and the Early Modern State: From More to Cavendish. Fiction, the Body and the State -- Anatomy, Early Modernity and the Prosthetic Imagination -- Utopian Self-Fashioning from More to Cavendish -- The Prosthetic Imagination in the Early Novel Form -- The Colonial Body: From Behn to Goethe. Economies of Scale From Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott -- Colonialism and the World Picture in the Eighteenth-Century Novel -- Invisible Ink: Self-Fashioning and Self-Erasure in Daniel Defoe -- A Continuation of the Brain: Unregulated Bodies in Swift and Scott -- Organic Aesthetics from Richardson to Goethe -- The Organic and the Mechanic -- The Full and the Empty -- Attachment and Evasion -- The Manufactured Body: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker. The Dead Hand: Realism and Biomaterial -- The Dead Hand: Realism and Biomaterial in the Nineteenth-Century -- Irony and Biocritique from Wollstonecraft to Austen -- The Dyer's Hand: Narrative and Biomaterial in Dickens and Eliot -- An Inside Narrative: Prosthetic life in Melville -- Strange Affinity: Gothic Prosthetics from Shelley to Stoker -- The Modernist Body: From James to Beckett -- A Duplication of Consciousness: Realism -- A Duplication of Consciousness: Realism, Modernism and Prosthetic Self-Fashioning -- Modernism and the Fin de Siècle -- Art and Embodiment in James and Wharton -- All Twined Together: Prosthetic Modernism from Proust to Beckett -- Survival and Annihilation Entwined Within Me: Gathering and Dispersal in the Modernist Novel -- Landscape of Prosthetics and Simulacra -- The Limits of the Word -- Like-lines: Simulacral Prosthetics in Morrison and Pynchon -- Prosthetic Worlds in the Twenty-First-Century Novel. World, Nature, Culture -- Hand, Face, Wall -- Mind, Body, World. "What is the relation between the mimetic and the prosthetic? How does the process of making pictures or likenesses of reality (in paint, in film, in prose) relate to our fashioning of artificial bodies, the manufacturing of the plastic forms with which we augment and enhance our naked extension into the world, what Freud calls the mere 'inch of nature' which we are given? This question was given a rather palpable form for me when, as part of my initial preparation for writing this book, I spent some time with a prosthetic surgeon who specialises in facial prosthetics. The surgeon - Charles - took me to a room in which there were a number of wooden cabinets, where he stored facial prostheses in drawers. He wanted to show me some of them, he said, in order to give me a sense of the range of different kinds of prostheses he made. He had these faces in his possession because, as his patients aged or grew, he regularly updated their prostheses"--
|
