Aviva Briefel is Professor of English and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College, Maine. She is the author of The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (2006) and the co-editor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (2011).

'The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination is an essential read for Victorian, Modernist, and even Postmodern and Contemporary scholars. Briefel's excellent book contributes to the fields of hand, literary rape, feminist, postcolonial, and posthuman studies, demanding that we explore the ethical implications of reading the hand in the Victorian imagination as a signifier of either individual or collective identity by contending with questions of race all too often overlooked.' Kimberly Cox, The British Society for Literature and Science Reviews

• Introduction; 1. The case of the blank hand: race and manual legibility; 2. Potters and prosthetics: putting Indian hands to work; 3. The mummy's hand: art and evolution; 4. A hand for a hand: punishment, responsibility, and imperial desire; 5. Crimes of the hand: manual violence and the Congo; Coda; Bibliography.