This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the ¿limit cases¿ regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries of knowledge. These cases cast troubling and distorted shadows on the culture, throwing into relief the values, vested interests, and power relations regarding the construction of embodied life and consciousness that underpinned the understanding of what it was to be alive in the long nineteenth century. Ranging over a period from the mid-eighteenth century through to the first decade of the twentieth century¿an era that has been called the ¿Age of Science¿¿the essays collected here consider the cultural ripple effects of those previously unimaginable revolutions in science and medicine on humanity¿s understanding of being.

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in English (Long-Eighteenth Century) at NUI Galway, Ireland. She has published a monograph on William Blake entitled Blake and the Failure of Prophecy (2021) and a range of articles and essays on gender and sexuality in Blake's writing, and on women's writing in the long-eighteenth century.

Michelle O'Connell is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published essays and articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and fiction, and is currently working on a full-length study of the construction of the nineteenth-century female poetic subject. 

Introduction Lucy Cogan & Michelle O'Connell.- Part I: Materialism, Bodies and Embodiment.- Chapter 1: 'Poe, Lucretius and Materialism.' Robert Miles.- Chapter 2: 'The Body Impoverished: The Place of Gender and Race in Poverty Narratives of the 1880s.' Lucy Hartley.- Chapter 3: 'The Horrors of Still Life: Taxidermy and the Gothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.' Elizabeth Effinger.- Chapter 4:  '"Thy paleness makes me glad": Death, Sympathy and the Body in Keats's Isabella.' Greta Columbani.- Part II: Altered States.- Chapter 5: '"The Dangers of Vinous Potation": Tracing the Influence of Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia on Representations of Drunkenness in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth.' Lucy Cogan.- Chapter 6: 'Wandering Attention: Victorian Daydreaming and the Boundaries of Consciousness.' Athena Vrettos.- Chapter 7: 'Leonora Piper: Mediumship, Gender, and the Societies for Psychical Research.' Dara Downey.- Chapter 8: '"[T]o Feel Powers at Work in the Common Air Unfelt by Other": Receptiveness and the Vanishing Body in Victorian Literature and Culture.' Greta Perletti.- Part III: Gender and the Limits of Sex.- Chapter 9: 'Heroism Reclaimed: Age, Masculinity and Genitourinary Medicine in Edwardian London.' Kieran Fitzpatrick.- Chapter 10: 'Intersex Boundaries: Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Hermaphroditic Bodies.' Jolene Zigarovich.- Chapter 11: '"Absurd Speculations": The Morbid Uterus in Haeckel, von Hartmann and Thomas Hardy's "Prenatal Poetics."' Natalie Mann.