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The hands of colonized subjects - South Asian craftsmen, Egyptian mummies, harem women, and Congolese children - were at the crux of Victorian discussions of the body that tried to come to terms with the limits of racial identification. While religious, scientific, and literary discourses privileged hands as sites of physiognomic information, none of these found plausible explanations for what these body parts could convey about ethnicity. As compensation for this absence, which might betray the fact that race was not actually inscribed on the body, fin-de-siècle narratives sought to generate models for how non-white hands might offer crucial means of identifying and theorizing racial identity. They removed hands from a holistic corporeal context and allowed them to circulate independently from the body to which they originally belonged. Severed hands consequently served as 'human tools' that could be put to use in a number of political, aesthetic, and ideological contexts.

English fiction --- Race in literature. --- Hand in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Imperialism in literature.

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English fiction --- Race in literature. --- Hand in literature. --- History and criticism.

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Focusing on the gestures of giving, touching, showing and handcrafting, this study examines key scenes of tactile interaction between subject and artifact. The readings of this book call for a revision of an optically obscured aesthetics and poetics to include haptic experience as an often overlooked but pivotal part of the making as well as the perception of literature and the arts.

Gesture in literature. --- Hand in literature. --- Experimental poetry, Russian. --- Chekhov. --- Freud. --- Heidegger. --- Kharms. --- Mandelstam. --- Nabokov. --- Russian Avant-garde. --- Tolstoy. --- Vertov. --- art. --- cultural history. --- hands. --- haptics. --- iconography. --- literary theory. --- metaphor. --- poetics. --- propaganda. --- rhetorics. --- symbolism. --- touch. --- visual media.