Swift excels where abstract philosophy collides with concrete forms. The first two sections of this chapter focus on Gulliver’s Travels, in which airy discourses on principles and abstract intellectual scenarios are inevitably perforated by the coarse realities of the body. His painstaking attention to corporeality unravels the polite discourses that help people distance themselves from the embarrassing ailments, extrusions, flaws, and failures that their bodies always comprise. The final section of the chapter shifts to Swift’s poems on female beauty, which, this chapter argues, revel in bodily disaggregation.

During his eleven years in Jamaica, Long was, like other planters, practising racialization – enacting racial difference in every public and private space, living his whiteness as power. But he was also clearly reflecting on it, observing it, thinking about it. He was horrified by the Somerset trial: slave-owners could no longer rely on the law to secure their rights over enslaved property. Mansfield had discovered, he wrote in his vitriolic polemic, ‘the art of washing the black-a-moor white’. But this could not be: black people could not become white. When it came to the History, his task, as he saw it, was to persuade his audience, and himself, that Africans were essentially, naturally, different from Whites. He utilized the Enlightenment debates on the nature of the human and the animal, arguing with the great French naturalist Buffon and insisting, on the basis of body and mind, that whites and ‘Negroes’ were different species. Yet he insisted that plantation life civilized Africans, that creoles could become good servants to their masters, and he refused to face any contradiction. Similarly, despite his hatred of miscegenation he hoped that ‘mulattoes’ could become a useful bridge between colonizers and enslaved.

After an initial inquiry into the distinction between difference and the differential, in a text’s constant divergence from itself, the chapter examines the relationship between language and anatomy: how deeply embedded in the body is language? How biological is it? And what repercussions do these questions have for translation? There follow further reflections on the written and the spoken and poetry’s part in that dichotomy. The chapter then engages with issues of speech-flow and articulation and goes on to look at connections between diversity and the subjectivation of expression.

Many Indigenous lowland South American peoples treat the thinking, feeling self as constituted by the process of relating to a panoply of others, including enemies. This need for alterity in the constitution of selves is arguably part of a loose but widespread and enduring pattern – an ‘Amazonian package’ – that also tends to feature claims to the effect that the collective fabrication of beautiful, competent, human bodies is a central purpose of human social life, in the context of a cosmos in which beings with similar bodies perceive each other as human and those with different bodies as non-human. I examine practices and speech genres in which people attribute an evaluative gaze to murdered enemies, sorcerers, would-be lovers, and fishhooks, among other figures of alterity, and I argue that such attributions reflect and reproduce motivating pictures of moral subjects. Over time and motivated by these pictures, people have gone about living their lives such that their evaluative deployments have more or less felicitously interpellated new generations. Morality has thus been central in the reproduction of the Amazonian package. The process, however, is not teleological.

Across his career, as the previous work of this chapter’s author and that of other critics such as Andrzej Duszenko, M. Keith Booker, David Ben-Merre, Jeffrey Drouin, and Ruben Borg has shown, James Joyce frequently included reflections on a changing landscape of time in response to Einstein’s ‘new physics’. However, while there has been important recent research touching on this topic, including the author’s wider survey of work in modernist studies, no critic has yet fully centred the watch as a technological index of Joyce’s attitudes to time. In this essay, three specific examples of Joyce’s concern with watch technology are looked at, located in the relationship of timepiece and character; firstly, Bertha’s wristwatch in Joyce’s play Exiles (1918), followed by Bloom’s pocket watch in Ulysses (1922) and, finally, HCE’s timepiece in Finnegans Wake. Each of these watches evidence Joyce’s complex feelings about connections between embodiment, sexuality, and technology.

In its emphasis on reading as bound up with agency, Red Moon repudiates not only the domestic near fiction but also the reading practices commonly labelled ‘surface reading’, as they would seek to reinstate a divide between aesthetics and politics. Although the novel registers the pull of the body, it makes it codependent on a social totality that is itself reconceptualised in the wake of ecological emergency. The collective vessel for this body is the superpower state, which not only wields power enough to change the course of the Anthropocene but is also accessible to a narrative that leads out from the present without heading straight into apocalypse. The chapter ends by considering Red Moon as an instance of the historical novel set in the future, in which the utopian nation state, and the collectivity that underpins it, only exists as a dialectical relationship between part and whole, space and time.

If the domestic near future operates with residual and dominant cultural forms, in Raymond Williams’s terms, it also provides glimpses of potential emergent formations. This chapter reads two novels that give a particularly vivid sense of the incipient genre of near-future revolution struggling within inherited genres that can register but not properly embody it. While the eponymous company in The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013) provides a more legible delineation of the Anthropocene than the environmental disasters that often populate the domestic near future, its victory relies on a similar investment in individual embodiment, that has as its correlate a latent antipathy to collective agency – such as might coalesce in the prospective revolution glimpsed at the novel’s close. Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich (2013) progresses from a devastating satire of apocalyptic capitalism into an oscillation between shattered human communities and a dangerous journeying: between capitalist realism in the shadow of dystopia and the adventure romance. However, almost despite itself, the novel dowses at its end towards another kind of collective that would also be another form of novel.

The figure of the child has frequently been seen as central to discourses about the future; this chapter argues that its importance is trumped by the sensorially rich individual body. In Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (2015), the child introduces a temporality of change and is associated with collectives that can only appear as a threat. In The Rapture (2009) by Liz Jensen, climate events intensify embodiment, while the desolation of apocalypse finds its true aetiology in the compound spectre of parenthood and the public realm. Her (2014, dir. Spike Jonze) is oblivious to climate change but shaped by a valorisation of the human body ensconced in domestic comfort, as it is threatened by the spectre of the mass. In all three fictions, the turn to the body is the denial of a fundamental equality with an Other both within and without the state. The chapter closes by showing how John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) passes from a nationalist dystopia to the germ of a utopian collective in which the legacies of colonialism are finally overcome, to an isolation buoyed by material comfort, in a manner that updates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for the Anthropocene.

It has been noted by numerous scholars that Wallace’s writing of sexual activity and identity was, to say the least, unsatisfying. Often violent and/or coercive, almost always alienating, and generally involving repulsion either within or beyond the text, sex is a site of conflict for Wallace. While juvenile sexual jokes animate the early work in particular (Frequent and Vigorous being the prime example), meaningful sexual experiences are few. Sex is problematic; phantom pregnancies and the choice of masturbation over sexual intimacy recur as images of the wasteful productivity of contemporary society and culture, while rape and sexual manipulation are common behaviors of the solipsistic (usually male) characters peopling this space. This chapter outlines some of the primary motifs of sex and sexuality in Wallace’s work, examining the ways in which he used the sexual subject to dramatize forms of social intercourse and self-expression and exploring the connections between sex, power and communication in his writing.

While Wallace’s fiction is famously “about what it means to be a fucking human being,” there is a consistent strain of posthumanism in his writing that has formed a rich thread of scholarship, from Hayles’ technological lens and Giles’ sentimental reading through to Hayes-Brady’s consideration of the body as object, Hering’s examination of the self as a spatial nexus and Vermeule’s Schopenhauerian reading of mind/body dualism. Indeed, it is difficult to encounter Wallace at all without a consideration of the post-ness of his humanism. At the heart of this posthumanism is an ambivalence about the locus of the self in a deeply networked yet alienating world, where telephones and roads are as much a barrier to communion as they are conducive. Beginning with the most disembodied characters – Wallace’s many ghosts – the chapter draws attention to the ways in which the disembodied self in Wallace’s work – pure consciousness – is limited and impotent. The chapter also examines the representation of the most deeply embodied characters – babies – as the other side of this coin, incoherent and narcissistic. Engaging philosophies of dualism and embodiment as well as drawing on the more recent neuroscientific turn in literary studies, this chapter argues that consciousness for Wallace involves imagining the mind in and of the body. This chapter connects this section with the following one, reminding us that for Wallace the self exists always and only within the world.

This chapter argues that American horror is defined both by its “paraliterary” status and by its representations of the bloodied body in pain. Unlike the more culturally prestigious category of the Gothic, which typically dwells on the crisis of the rational mind, horror has tended to appear in culturally maligned or ephemeral forms and focus on corporeal pain, violence, and distress. Horror's focus on the body, it is further suggested, stems from the modern American state's withholding of freedoms according to embodied characteristics: race, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on. The historical appearance of horror narratives often correlates to crisis and tensions surrounding the expansion of the civil and political rights that centrist liberalism promised, so that when previously excluded or marginalized groups begin to demand inclusion and recognition of their past disempowerment, horror becomes a medium especially electric with these concerns.

In this chapter, we explore the concept of purity and the processes of purification in their archaeological as well as broader national expressions. The discussion touches on aesthetic and religious conceptions of a pure, sacralized past, on the removal of living people from archaeological landscapes, and on the modernist separation of past from present, science from culture, and of the rational from the affective.

Chapter 4 describes the debates that took place in the press immediately after the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which drew attention to the relationship between new concepts of the able body and the militarization of discourses of productivity. In the first Balkan War, the Ottoman armies were soundly defeated, and the empire lost its last landholdings in the Balkans. The perceived infirmities of the “Ottoman body” became a common thread in social critiques calling for all-out mobilization. This chapter traces the relationship between conceptualizations of the healthy, productive, and able body and discourses on the formation of an ideal citizen, as articulated by moralists, journalists, public figures, and memoirists of the Balkan Wars. I expose how calls for a productive body militarized a social issue during a time when Ottomans faced imminent threats of invasion. The militarization that characterized the last decade of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic cannot be understood without first considering the process by which the body of the citizen became a site of national anxiety.

Narrative medicine, a discipline largely built upon literary studies in confluence with healthcare, bridges cultural divides between sufferers and healers and offers a framework for reading and writing illness, person to person and person to text.This chapter discusses Roth's work within this framework, highlighting how his stories of the body – in health, in illness, in pain, in dying – demonstrate radical empathy and humanism.

This essay investigates how and why physical ‘wholeness’ became culturally dominant in the nineteenth century, and how literary representations of prosthetics engaged with this hegemony. The first part parses the historical factors underpinning the rise of physical ‘normalcy’, including coalescing theories that drew together mind and body, the rise of bodily statistics, lingering fears of contagion, changes to the Poor Laws, unshifting gendered social demands, and the marketing efforts of emerging prosthetists. The second part then turns to transgressive literary imaginaries of prostheses. Using two fictional case studies that represent artificial-hand users, English poet, novelist, and playwright Robert Williams Buchanan’s ‘Lady Letitia’s Lilliput Hand’ (1862) and the lesser-known short-story writer T. Lockhart’s ‘Prince Rupert’s Emerald Ring’ (1895), I argue that literary representations of prostheses often simultaneously reinforced and complicated the hegemony of physical ‘completeness’. Such stories perpetuated fears of physical disaggregation while also bringing into question the efficacy of prostheticising. This essay therefore offers an innovative approach to Victorian studies and the history of prostheses by re-evaluating attitudes to artificial body parts in relation to the social mandate for ‘wholeness’ and highlighting how literary texts provided important critiques of prostheses designed to enable users to ‘pass’ as ‘normal’.

Archival practice and recovery have been foundational to feminist criticism and theory, and continue to be advocated by those who perceive, with dissatisfaction, ongoing gender disparities within the broadly inclusive mandate of the new modernist studies. Starting with the supposition that taxonomy is somatic, this chapter explores the long, complex history of the categorised body in relation to the archives of Mina Loy and Anna Mendelssohn. Modernist and late modernist respectively, Loy and Mendelssohn were British, Jewish, and feminist; both worked productively from the margins of male avant-garde kinship groups. Excision from or discomfort with identificatory labels are abiding themes of their literature, truths highly evident in their conflicted, archived writings on artistry and parenting, which challenge and contort stereotypical classification. In tandem with Loy’s and Mendelssohn’s taxonomic ambivalence, this essay posits a generative interstitiality that reworks archival frameworks and categories alike.

Chapter 4 explores the transhumanist pursuit of morphological freedom. It asks, how does the transhumanist attempt to transform the body compare and contrast with “social skins” found in other societies (Turner 1980)? Transhumanists insist that individuals should be allowed to do with their bodies what they please. At first glance, therefore, what they seem to champion is not a social skin, but rather a sovereign skin, a purely autonomous body and subject that will be unhampered by the pressures of society and absolutely free to develop in whatever way he/she/they see fit. A closer look at transhumanist initiatives to modify or enhance the body, however, do reveal a commitment to a shared set of meanings and values. Therefore, by focusing on some of the iniitatives that animate pursuits of morphological freedom, this chapter sheds further light on the values and meanings that animate the transhumanist world view. It also considers how the transhumanist pursuit of morphological freedom might be establishing new standards of techno-normativity that could have a profound consequences for the way subjects and societies will be disciplined and stratified in the future.