Ann Gagné is educational developer at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Ann Gagné’s innovative cultural history of touch in the nineteenth century traces the ways in which tactility gets imagined and politicized through literary form. Drawing together phenomenology, disability studies, medical history, and literary studies, Gagné’s project historicizes touch as it constitutes identities through bodily contact that became increasingly surveilled and policed by Victorian public health. This situating of touch and its many incarnations within a set of ideological debates about its intercorporeal quality prompts Gagné’s urgent meditation on the ethics of tactility as a social and cultural experience tied to how we care for one another. Embodying the Tactile in Victorian Literature: Touching Bodies/Bodies Touching offers accessible, interdisciplinary readings of tactility that reconceptualize the seemingly quotidian experience of touch in terms of a nuanced, relational theory of the tactile.

• Chapter 1: Reciprocal Touch as Touching Me: Touching You: Goblin Market and “The Leper” Chapter 2: Touch that Reinforces Architecture: Embodying Tactile Performance: The Ethics of the Dust and “Alan’s Wife”Chapter 3: Homosocial, Homosexual, and Touching the Self: Teleny and “Gone Under”Chapter 4: Telepathic Touch in “The Withered Arm” and “Mrs. Zant and the Ghost”Chapter 5: Manus Ex Machina: Lady Audley’s Secret and Tactile Residue