The limits of the human : fictions of anomaly, race, and gender in the long eighteenth century / Felicity A. Nussbaum.

"Felicity Nussbaum examines literary and cultural representation of human difference in England and its empire during the long eighteenth century. With a special focus on women's writing, she analyzes canonical and lesser-known novels and plays from the Restoration to abolition. She considers a range of anomalies (defects, disease, and disability) as they intermingle with ideas of a racial femininity and masculinity to define "normalcy" as national identity. Incorporating writings by Behn, Burney, and the Bluestockings - as well as Southerne, Shaftesbury, Johnson, Sterne, and Equiano - Nussbaum treats a range of disabilities - being mute, blind, lame - and physical oddities such as eunuchism and giantism. She shows that these corporeal features, perceived as aberrant and extraordinary, combine in the popular imagination to reveal a repertory of differences located between the extremes of splendid and horrid novelty."--Jacket.