Transplantation gothic : tissue transfer in literature, film, and medicine

This book is a shadow cultural history of transplantation as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth century to the present. Works in these genres explore the experience of donors or suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of ‘slow violence’ (Rob Nixon), precarity and structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. Gothic tropes, intertextualities and narrative conventions are used in life writing to express the affective and conceptual challenges of post-transplant being, and used in medical writing to manage the ambiguities of hybrid bodies, as a ‘clinical necropoetics’. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. Works discussed include nineteenth-century Gothic, early twentieth-century fiction and film, 1970s American hospital organ theft horror in literature and film, turn-of-the-millennium fiction and film of organ sale, postmillennial science fiction dystopias, life writing and scientific writing from the nineteenth century to the present. Throughout, Gothic representations engage contemporary debates around the management of chronic illness, the changing economics of healthcare and the biopolitics of organ procurement and transplantation – in sum, the strange times and weird spaces of tissue mobilities. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation. "This book is a shadow cultural history of transplantation as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth century to the present. These works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of 'slow violence' (Rob Nixon), precarity and structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. Gothic tropes, intertextualities and narrative conventions are used in life writing to express the affective and conceptual challenges of post-transplant being and used in medical writing to manage the ambiguities of hybrid bodies, as a 'clinical necropoetics'. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. Works discussed include nineteenth century Gothic, early twentieth century fiction and film, 1970s American hospital organ theft horror in literature and film, turn-of-the-millennium fiction and film of organ sale, postmillennial science fiction dystopias, life writing, and scientific writing from the nineteenth century to the present. Throughout, Gothic representations engage contemporary debates around the management of chronic illness, the changing economics of healthcare and the biopolitics of organ procurement and transplantation-the strange times and weird spaces of tissue mobilities. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation." -- Back cover Winner of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2022. Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize 2020. Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation. Front matter Dedication Contents List of figures Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Bodies dis(re)membered: Gothic and the transplant imaginary Clinical necropoetics: medical and ethics writing of death and transplantation The bioemporium: corporate medical horror in late twentieth-century American transfer fiction Clinical labour and slow violence: transnational harvest horror and racial vulnerability at the turn of the millennium Possession? Uncanny assemblage and embodied scripts in tissue recipient horror Scalpel and metaphor: ‘machines of social death’ and state-sanctioned harvest in dystopian fiction Coda: Writing wounds Filmography Bibliography Index Transplantation is a boundary practice unsettling distinctions between self and other, life and death. This book identifies a Gothic mode in representations of the practice in literature, film and science from the nineteenth century to the present, considering hybrid bodies and precarious lives under neoliberal late capitalism. -- .