Inspired by Erving Goffman's understanding of stigma management, Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier takes a fresh look at the representation of Otherness and transgression in Victorian fiction in different forms - social and moral as well as physical, in terms of gender and mentality as well as aestheticism. In reaction to current disability studies, Brusberg-Kiermeier proposes the term 'unfitness' as a more appropriate and holistic concept for the examination of Victorian texts and implies that it was unfitness that was suspended over the heads of the Victorians like the sword of Damocles. She argues that contrary to the understanding of disability applied in Victorian studies so far, the concept of unfitness can include all varieties of afflictions which the writers are negotiating in their texts.The study suggests that while the eighteenth century saw the desire to catalogue nature in order to domesticate the natural grotesque - asymmetrical features and irregular landscapes hitherto regarded as ugly -, the nineteenth century brought about a first scientific categorization of humans and the domestication of the human grotesque. These endeavours were reflected in the development of the dominant literary genres and subgenres.The conceptualization of the investigation has also been inspired by the Victorians' fascination with categorization and classification. The categories adopted, adapted, and questioned in this scholarly 'cabinet of curiosities' are derived from the cultural constructions of the time and reflect the Victorians' views of unfitness.In contrast to studies on the Gothic or enfreakment, this investigation places the inclusive strategies of the texts in the limelight and argues that the narratives were often motivated by reformative ideas. For their white middle-class didactic project the authors appropriated the concept of sympathy - which Darwin established as a biological one - as the 'social glue' to bind different members of society together. The concept of sympathy was gradually to be redefined and corrupted towards the end of the century for the new science of eugenics.The structure of the investigation imitates the three-decker novel. While the first chapter gives an overview of the varieties of unfitness and their sublimation, as found in Victorian fiction, the other two chapters illustrate the double standard of the time. They argue that male unfitness could be contained with the help of the concept of eccentricity, whereas there was no such general inclusive concept available for female unfitness. The female characters can therefore be shown as fluctuating between the two extremes of angelicness and monstrosity.

Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier has been professor for English literature and didactics at Hildesheim University since 2011 and has taught and lectured in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, and the U.S.A. She holds a PhD from the Free University Berlin and published her thesis on the stagings of the body in William Shakespeares histories in 1999 (Körper-Inszenierungen in Shakespeares Historien, Peter Lang). She is co-editor of, among others, Shakespeare in the Media: From the Globe Theatre to the World Wide Web (Peter Lang 2004, 2nd ed. 2010), Victorian Highways, Victorian Byways: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Trafo 2010), Die Evolution des James Bond: Stabilität und Wandel (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2014), and two journal issues: Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Drama and Performance (Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, vol. 7, no. 1/2019), and Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary British Cultures (Journal for the Study of British Cultures, vol. 28, no. 2/2021). She has also written on Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer, Agatha Christie, Michael Frayn and Sarah Kane, Alfred Hitchcock and Christopher Nolan.