Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Literature, 1740-1901

Introduction: Touching the Victorians: A Theoretical Context

1. When Hands Touch: "'Tis Hard to Give the Hand Where the Heart Can Never Be"

2. A Language of Touch?

3. Grip, Clasp, Embrace: Reciprocation and Proximity

Chapter 1: Rape: Hand-Grabbing in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa

1. Nonconsensual Touch in Tess of the D'Urbervilles

2. Hands and Haptics in the Eighteenth-Century

3. Conduct Manuals: The Social and Sexual Dangers of Uninvited Touch

4. Clarissa's Hands, Robert's Grasp: Violent Seizure, Nonreciprocal Touch, and Assault

5. Uninvited: Hand-Grabbing As Sexual Violation

Chapter 2: Attraction: Reciprocal Touch in the Conduct Fiction of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen

1. Aggression to Affection: A New Type of Literary Touch

2. Rape, Legal Discourse, and Haptic Experience in Evelina

3. Defining Consent: Violence Versus Reciprocity

4. Consensual and Nonconsensual Contact in Burney's Evelina

5. Tactile Reciprocity and Female Sexual Subjectivity in Austen's Emma

Chapter 3: Desire: Transgressing Handshake Etiquette in Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

1. Etiquette and Invitation: Consensual, Reciprocal Handshakes in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

2. Negotiating Desire: Invited Touch in Jane Eyre

3. Shifting Masculinity, Female Agency, and Tactile Intimacy

4. Materializing Self-Realization through Haptic Reciprocity

Chapter 4: Sexuality: The Tactile Erotics of Gloved and Ungloved Touch

1. Safety in Surfaces: Glove Etiquette, Class, and Respectability

2. Surfaces of Safety: A History of Gloves and "Gloves"

3. Maintaining Surfaces: Exerting the Glove in Emma and Tess of the D'Urbervilles

4. Constructing Surfaces: Controlling the Glove in In the Year of Jubilee

5. Transgressing Surfaces: Penetrating the Glove in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Odd Women, and "On the Western Circuit"

A. Affection on the Surface

B. Desire beneath the Surface

6. Controlling the Glove

Chapter 5: Orientation: Queer Touch, Proximity, and Erotic Potential

1. Queer Touch and Disorientation: Becoming "off line"

2. Intensifying Proximity: Nearness and Tactile Intimacy in The Picture of Dorian Gray

3. Pressure: Men Touching Men

4. Clinging: Women Touching Women

5. Praying: Clinging Hands in Adam Bede

6. The Queer Potentiality of Literary Touch

Epilogue: Touching Ourselves: A Neo-Victorian Case Study

1. Continuity: (Un)Invited, (Non)Reciprocal Touch in Neo-Victorian Fiction

2. Reimagining Female Tactile Power in Fingersmith and The Parasol Protectorate

3. Futurity: Touching Forward