ABSTRACT
Haggard’s African writing is preoccupied with racial bodies. This engagement is not unusual, for in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the body functions as a privileged trope in a variety of discourses ranging from the medical, anthropological and literary to the critical. The body’s metaphoric standing renders it an exemplary historical map of social relations; the model of the physiologically healthy body was a common means of conceptualising psychological, national, literary and racial health. For not only are issues of sexuality, health and disease addressed physiologically but urban poverty, crime, race, nationality and literature also are discoursed upon via the figure of the body. This chapter will carve out four distinct thematic areashealth and the nation, the gendered body, the colonial body and the cultural body-with references to the culture and literature of the political Right in order better to situate the historical dimensions of the bodily fantasy surrounding white and black bodies.
