Chapter 5 - Strange Affinity: Gothic Prosthetics from Shelley to Stoker

Summary

This chapter, the second of two chapters focusing on the nineteenth-century prosthetic imagination, suggests that the Gothic tradition offers another way of thinking about the dead hand. It reads dead-handedness, or mortmain, as it runs through the Gothic novel of the period, from Shelley to Poe to Stoker, Stevenson and Wilde, to suggest that the Gothic offers an undertow to the work of the realist novel in transforming dead flesh into living being. The Gothic works against the realist novel, in is refusal of the animating work of narrative; but as the chapter reads this opposition, it suggests a shared investment, in both the realist and the Gothic traditions, in the tension between dead and living material, under the conditions produced by industrialisation, and by emerging information technologies.