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9781501731594

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This stunningly original study shows how the permeable human epidermis (blushing, pallid, tattooed, rouged) reflects changing and contested beliefs about identity and interiority, body and feeling. A major contribution to our understanding of 19th century literary realism, Gilbert brilliantly discusses how skin's mediating properties demand nuanced and historicized methods of what's literally surface reading. -- Kate Flint, University of Southern California Victorian Skin is the prehistory of our obsession with our visible bodies. Pamela K. Gilbert's engagement with the Victorians' reading of the skin, from their sense of it as an envelope that holds our very self to the tattoos that reveal our inner essence, is sophisticated and extraordinary. A must read for everyone who owns a mirror! -- Sander Gilman, Emory University, author of <I>Stand Up Straight!</I> Pamela Gilbert has written a magisterial book that covers an encyclopedic range of issues: materialist physiology, affect, somatic diagnoses, Darwinism, classical myth, realism, and Victorian fiction. Victorian Skin, lucidly blending multiple discourses, is an impressively accomplished work. -- Talia Schaffer, Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center, CUNY Fascinating and capacious, Victorian Skin invites us to rethink the surface of the body and what's at stake in those discourses-medical, philosophical, political, and literary, that describe the body's relation to the world. The result is a stunning interdisciplinary intervention in Victorian Studies and a new way of reading Victorian realism's investment in the body's surface. -- Kathy Psomiades, Duke University

This stunningly original study shows how the permeable human epidermis (blushing, pallid, tattooed, rouged) reflects changing and contested beliefs about identity and interiority, body and feeling. A major contribution to our understanding of 19th century literary realism, Gilbert brilliantly discusses how skin's mediating properties demand nuanced and historicized methods of what's literally surface reading. -- Kate Flint, University of Southern California Victorian Skin is the prehistory of our obsession with our visible bodies. Pamela K. Gilbert's engagement with the Victorians' reading of the skin, from their sense of it as an envelope that holds our very self to the tattoos that reveal our inner essence, is sophisticated and extraordinary. A must read for everyone who owns a mirror! -- Sander Gilman, Emory University, author of <I>Stand Up Straight!</I> Pamela Gilbert has written a magisterial book that covers an encyclopedic range of issues: materialist physiology, affect, somatic diagnoses, Darwinism, classical myth, realism, and Victorian fiction. Victorian Skin, lucidly blending multiple discourses, is an impressively accomplished work. -- Talia Schaffer, Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center, CUNY Fascinating and capacious, Victorian Skin invites us to rethink the surface of the body and what's at stake in those discourses-medical, philosophical, political, and literary, that describe the body's relation to the world. The result is a stunning interdisciplinary intervention in Victorian Studies and a new way of reading Victorian realism's investment in the body's surface. -- Kathy Psomiades, Duke University

This stunningly original study shows how the permeable human epidermis (blushing, pallid, tattooed, rouged) reflects changing and contested beliefs about identity and interiority, body and feeling. A major contribution to our understanding of 19th century literary realism, Gilbert brilliantly discusses how skin's mediating properties demand nuanced and historicized methods of what's literally surface reading. -- Kate Flint, Provost Professor of Art History and English, University of Southern California Victorian Skin is the prehistory of our obsession with our visible bodies. Pamela K. Gilbert's engagement with the Victorians' reading of the skin, from their sense of it as an envelope that holds our very self to the tattoos that reveal our inner essence, is sophisticated and extraordinary. A must read for everyone who owns a mirror! -- Sander Gilman, author of <I>Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture</I> Pamela Gilbert has written a magisterial book that covers an encyclopedic range of issues: materialist physiology, affect, somatic diagnoses, Darwinism, classical myth, realism, and Victorian fiction. Victorian Skin, lucidly blending multiple discourses, is an impressively accomplished work. -- Talia Schaffer, Professor of English, Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center, CUNY Fascinating and capacious, Victorian Skin invites us to rethink the surface of the body and what's at stake in those discourses-medical, philosophical, political, and literary, that describe the body's relation to the world. The result is a stunning interdisciplinary intervention in Victorian Studies and a new way of reading Victorian realism's investment in the body's surface. -- Kathy Psomiades, Duke University

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Pamela K. Gilbert is Albert Brick Professor at the University of Florida. Her books include Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels, Mapping the Victorian Social Body, The Citizen's Body, and Cholera and Nation.

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