Defects: Engendering the Modern Body

Defects brings together essays on the emergence of the concept of monstrosity in the eighteenth century and the ways it paralleled the emergence of notions of sexual difference. Women, declared a mid-eighteenth-century vindication, have been regarded since Aristotle as deformed amphibious things,...

Helen Deutsch is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture.Felicity Nussbaum is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Torrid Zones:...