Publisher's Synopsis
This work uses bio-medical, social scientific and literary texts to interrogate Victorian ideas of sexual difference. It emphasizes the effects in Victorian culture of notions of sexual instability and approximation.;While ideas about mutable or ambiguous sexuality provoked fear and fascination, they also served Victorian middle-class ideology by offering "scientific" ways of constructing racial, class and national identity in terms of the body. Throughout this period fierce public debates raged around prostitution, infanticide, working-class sexuality, female reproduction and domesticity. Drawing on works by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and the Brontes, the author explores the dialogue between literary and other discourses of sexuality.
