Anxious Anatomy

<p><b>Examines the body in literature and science in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.</b></p><p>In Anxious Anatomy Stefani Engelstein reconstructs the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century human body to offer startling new readings of major works by Goethe Blake Heinrich von Kleist E. T. A. Hoffmann Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Engelstein links research on reproduction both to the ability of organisms such as hydra snails and newts to replace severed heads and gouged out eyes and also to technical advances in battlefield amputation and artificial limbs. Readings of German and British literature alongside natural history surgery aesthetics and art illuminate the importance of investigations into the body for emerging theories of human subjectivity gender volition ethical behavior and political organization. Engelstein also demonstrates how attempts to explain the structural characteristics of the body developed into biological justifications for ideologies of race gender and social hierarchies.</p>