Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: monstrous tales; Part I. Anomaly and Gender: 1. Fictions of defect: Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood; 2. Effeminacy and femininity: Sarah Fielding, Elizabeth Montagu, and Johnson; 3. Odd women, mangled men: the bluestockings and Sterne; 4. Scarred women: Frances Burney and smallpox; Part II. Race and Gender: 5. Racial femininity: 'Our British Fair'; 6. Black women: why Imoinda turns white; 7. Black men: Equiano, Sancho, and being a man; 8. Black parts: racial counterfeit on stage; Coda: between races.

Promotional Information

In this book, Nussbaum examines literary and cultural representations of human difference in eighteenth-century English literature.

About the Author

Felicity Nussbaum is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (1995).

Reviews

"The moral impetus and humane sensibility of The Limits of the Human are evident ..." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900