{"product_id":"dead-hands-katherine-rowe-9780804733854","title":"Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDead Hands\u003c\/i\u003e traces the fascinating career of a curious imaginative device: the wandering, disembodied, or ghostly hand. The author situates this familiar gothic convention in its richer literary and intellectual contexts, from early modern English drama through American fiction. Dexterously threading historical, theoretical, and formalist questions through readings of the plays of Shakespeare and Webster and the haunted tales of Maupassant, Le Fanu, and Twain, the book illuminates the complex social fictions invested in the faculties of the hand and tested by this evocative device.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe book brings together a broad and eclectic array of \"manual\" iconography: from sixteenth-century religious imagery, medical anatomies, emblem books, witchcraft and folklore, to the popular metaphors of nineteenth-century industrialism, contemporary labor movements, and forensic science. Literary \"dead hands\" draw on and elaborate these varied traditions, to sometimes humorous and sometimes chilling effect.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAcross such disparate fields, the author argues, the figure of the \"dead hand\" represents a specific set of ideas about human agency: particularly, concerns about the fraught relationship between intentions (individual and collective) and meaningful action in the world. Severed and wandering, fictional dead hands challenge prevailing assumptions about bodily autonomy and control, directing us instead to the dependent, disabling, and self-alienating experiences of the acting self. In the process, they illuminate the changing assumptions about bodily experience--that \"sense\" of acting self--that sustain legal and political definitions of person in these different periods.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOutlining the dynamic history of this device--first as it migrates from visual art onto the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and later as it prospers in Anglo-American gothic fiction--\u003ci\u003eDead Hands\u003c\/i\u003e advances a comparatist reading of early modern and modern concepts of bodily action and its relation to interiority, authority, and identity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Katherine Rowe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0804733856\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780804733854\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Stanford University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 01\/01\/2000\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 288\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.00lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.82h x 5.79w x 0.83d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e 09\/01\/2000 pg. 128\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eReference and Research Bk News\u003c\/i\u003e 08\/01\/2000 pg. 189","brand":"Katherine Rowe","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":44120255135999,"sku":"9780804733854","price":80.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_8685c12a-8ac3-46c8-b28b-43d95c35e995.jpg?v=1687413326","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/dead-hands-katherine-rowe-9780804733854","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}