Synopses & Reviews
Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.
Review
"Vital Signs is a careful investigation of medical modes of thinking in the nineteenth century and their relationship to the Victorian realist novel. . . . of vital interest to anyone concerned with realism as a literary form. . . . an impressive work of cultural history. . . . Vital Signs has opened up a significant new approach to the issue of realism, and one that is argued persuasively in an unusually thorough and well-designed study."--P. Melville Logan, Victorian Studies
Review
"Vital Signs fulfills some of the urgent needs of literature and medicine as a discipline through its rigorous historical and intellectual scholarship, its perceptive close readings of several texts in the canon of literature and medicine, and its challenging assertions of the intimacy between clinical medicine and realism."--Rita Charon, Literature and Medicine
Review
"A unique historicist literary analysis of medical realism in fiction."--Marsha Terry Winter, Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Review
Vital Signs is a careful investigation of medical modes of thinking in the nineteenth century and their relationship to the Victorian realist novel. . . . of vital interest to anyone concerned with realism as a literary form. . . . an impressive work of cultural history. . . . Vital Signs has opened up a significant new approach to the issue of realism, and one that is argued persuasively in an unusually thorough and well-designed study. -- P. Melville Logan, Victorian Studies
Review
A unique historicist literary analysis of medical realism in fiction. Literature and Medicine
Review
Vital Signs fulfills some of the urgent needs of literature and medicine as a discipline through its rigorous historical and intellectual scholarship, its perceptive close readings of several texts in the canon of literature and medicine, and its challenging assertions of the intimacy between clinical medicine and realism. Rita Charon
Synopsis
'Vital Signs' offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. It also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.
Synopsis
"An important reinterpretation of nineteenth-century realism. Its description of the novel's interrelationship with the discourse of clinical medicine clearly surpasses that of any other study in its precision, detail, and complexity."--Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley
Synopsis
Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.
Synopsis
"An important reinterpretation of nineteenth-century realism. Its description of the novel's interrelationship with the discourse of clinical medicine clearly surpasses that of any other study in its precision, detail, and complexity."--Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | |
| Preface | |
1 | Medicine and Mimesis: The Contours of a Configuration | 3 |
2 | Disarticulating Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Medicalization of the Real | 15 |
3 | Paradigms and Professionalism: Balzacian Realism in Discursive Context | 46 |
4 | "A New Organ of Knowledge": Medical Organicism and the Limits of Realism in Middlemarch | 84 |
5 | On the Realism/Naturalism Distinction: Some Archaeological Considerations | 120 |
6 | From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism | 130 |
7 | The Pathological Perspective: Clinical Realism's Decline and the Emergence of Modernist Counter-Discourse | 148 |
| Epilogue: Toward a New Historicist Methodology | 175 |
| Notes | 193 |
| Index | 227 |