Overview
- Constructs a cultural history of organ exchange
- Offers extended readings of widely studied authors including William Faulkner, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mary Shelley, Chris Abani and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau
- Identifies three genres—sentiment, horror, and romance—as the formal conventions by which we make sense of transplantation in practice
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Removing an organ from one (typically dead) body and placing it in another living body challenges our most foundational ideas about boundaries between self and other, individual and social identity, life and death, health and illness. But despite these transgressions, organ transplant is a celebrated and relatively common procedure. Transplant Fictions brings together a diverse set of cultural representations to understand how we have overcome the profound ideological violations represented by organ exchange in order to reimagine the concept and practice as technological and moral victories. From the plots of horror stories and sci-fi novels to sentimental romances and feel-good media reports of stranger donation, this cultural study offers a nuanced portrait of the conceptual journey of organ exchange from strange and terrible to the “gift of life.”
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Emily Russell is an Associate Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, USA. She is the author of Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic (2011).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Transplant Fictions
Book Subtitle: A Cultural Study of Organ Exchange
Authors: Emily Russell
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12135-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-12134-1Published: 07 May 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-12137-2Published: 14 August 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-12135-8Published: 17 April 2019
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 310
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Literary History, Fiction, British and Irish Literature