Synopses & Reviews
Somatic Fictions focuses on the centrality of illnessparticularly psycho-somatic illnessas an imaginative construct in Victorian culture, emphasizing how it shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public. Vrettos uses nineteenth-century fiction, diaries, medical treatises, and health advice manuals to examine how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition. Tracing the concept of illness in the work of a variety of novelistsCharlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Meredith, Bram Stoker, and H. Rider Haggardshe explores the historical assumptions, patterns of perception, and structures of belief that invested sick and heat with cultural meaning.
Illness, with its power to make one's body seem alien, or to link disparate groups of people through contagion, suggested to Victorians the potential instability of social and biological identities. Displacing chaotic social issues onto matters of physiology, they managed a variety of social issues, including questions of race, imperialism, anthropometry, and health. This book explores how Victorian narrative registers fears of psychic and somatic permeability, sympathetic identification with another's pain, and conflicting measures of racial and cultural fitness.
Synopsis
This book focuses on the centrality of illnessparticularly psychosomatic illnessas an imaginative construct in Victorian culture. It shows how illness shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public, and how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition.
Synopsis
“Vrettos purpose in this thoroughly researched and extensively documented study is ‘to analyze the complex interaction between 19th-Century medical theory and narrative discourse. . . . Vrettos reading includes a wide range of materials (particularly nonliterary texts). An impressive work of both scholarship and criticism.”—Choice
Synopsis
This book shows the centrality of illness as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture.
Synopsis
This book focuses on the centrality of illness - particularly psychosomatic illness - as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture, emphasising how it shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public. The author uses nineteenth-century fiction, diaries, medical treatises, and health advice manuals to examine how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition. Tracing the concept of illness in the fiction of a variety of authors - Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Meredith, Bram Stoker, and H. Rider Haggard - Vrettos shows how Victorians attempted to manage diffuse and chaotic social issues by displacing them on to matters of physiology.
Table of Contents
Introduction; 1. Body language and the poetics of illness; 2. From neurosis to narrative: the private life of the nerves; 3. Neuromimesis and the medical gaze; 4. The national health: defining and defending bodily boundaries; Conclusion.