"Dead Hands" traces the fascinating career of a curious imaginative device: the wandering, disembodied, or ghostly hand. The author situates this familiar gothic convention in its richer literary and intellectual contexts, from early modern English drama through American fiction. Dexterously threading historical, theoretical, and formalist questions through readings of the plays of Shakespeare and Webster and the haunted tales of Maupassant, Le Fanu, and Twain, the book illuminates the complex social fictions invested in the faculties of the hand and tested by this evocative device. The book brings together a broad and eclectic array of manual iconography: from sixteenth-century religious imagery, medical anatomies, emblem books, witchcraft and folklore, to the popular metaphors of nineteenth-century industrialism, contemporary labor movements, and forensic science. Literary dead hands draw on and elaborate these varied traditions, to sometimes humorous and sometimes chilling effect.