Embodying the Tactile in Victorian Literature

This book explores the importance of the touch to social and cultural issues of embodiment in mid to late-Victorian literature. Through an exploration of canonical and lesser known texts, Ann Gagné demonstrates why touch, and the residue of touch, continues to be important to our lived experience today.

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Embodying the Tactile in Victorian Literature: Touching Bodies/Bodies Touching explores the importance of sensory studies in mid to late-Victorian literature. Ann Gagné reconciles the social and cultural issues surrounding embodiment, particularly gendered embodiment, through the lens of tactility and how touch can function as embodied residue. The main focus on tactility highlights bodily interactions through narrative description and positions lived experience as narrated and witnessed on the body through touch. By exploring four distinct types of tactility—reciprocal touch, architectural touch, self-touch, and telepathic touch—found in Victorian literature, Gagné reveals a larger social and cultural focus on ethics, care, the built environment, and pedagogy. Through analyses of more canonical texts such as Goblin Market alongside lesser known works by canonical authors such as Wilkie Collins’s “Mrs. Zant and the Ghost,” Gagné demonstrates how these same sensory considerations continue to be important today.