Profound Science and Elegant Literature

Profound Science and Elegant Literature PDF Author: Stephanie P. Browner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1847, at the first meeting of the American Medical Association, the newly elected president reminded his brethren that the profession, "once venerated," no longer earned homage "spontaneously and universally." The medical marketplace was crowded and competitive; state laws regulating medical practice had been repealed; and professional practitioners were often branded by their lay competitors as aristocrats bent on establishing a health care monopoly. By 1900, the battles were over, and, as the president of AMA had hoped, doctors were now widely venerated as men of profound science, elegant literature, polite accomplishments, and virtue. In fact, by 1900 the doctor had replaced the minister as the most esteemed professional in the United States; disease loomed larger than damnation; and science promised to manage the discord, differences, and excesses that democracy seemed to license. In Profound Science and Elegant Literature, Stephanie Browner charts this trajectory—and demonstrates at the same time that medicine's claims to somatic expertise and managerial talent did not go uncontested. Even as elite physicians founded institutions that made professional medicine's authority visible and legitimate, many others worried about the violence that might attend medicine's drive to mastery and science's equation of rational disinterest with white, educated masculinity. Reading fiction by a wide range of authors beside and against medical texts, Browner looks to the ways in which writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, James, Chesnutt, and Jewett inventoried the collateral damage that might be done as science installed its peculiar understanding of the body. A work of impressive interdisciplinary reach, Profound Science and Elegant Literature documents both the extraordinary rise of professional medicine in the United States and the aesthetic imperative to make the body meaningful that led many American writers to resist the medicalized body.

Profound Science and Elegant Literature

Profound Science and Elegant Literature PDF Author: Stephanie P. Browner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1847, at the first meeting of the American Medical Association, the newly elected president reminded his brethren that the profession, "once venerated," no longer earned homage "spontaneously and universally." The medical marketplace was crowded and competitive; state laws regulating medical practice had been repealed; and professional practitioners were often branded by their lay competitors as aristocrats bent on establishing a health care monopoly. By 1900, the battles were over, and, as the president of AMA had hoped, doctors were now widely venerated as men of profound science, elegant literature, polite accomplishments, and virtue. In fact, by 1900 the doctor had replaced the minister as the most esteemed professional in the United States; disease loomed larger than damnation; and science promised to manage the discord, differences, and excesses that democracy seemed to license. In Profound Science and Elegant Literature, Stephanie Browner charts this trajectory—and demonstrates at the same time that medicine's claims to somatic expertise and managerial talent did not go uncontested. Even as elite physicians founded institutions that made professional medicine's authority visible and legitimate, many others worried about the violence that might attend medicine's drive to mastery and science's equation of rational disinterest with white, educated masculinity. Reading fiction by a wide range of authors beside and against medical texts, Browner looks to the ways in which writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, James, Chesnutt, and Jewett inventoried the collateral damage that might be done as science installed its peculiar understanding of the body. A work of impressive interdisciplinary reach, Profound Science and Elegant Literature documents both the extraordinary rise of professional medicine in the United States and the aesthetic imperative to make the body meaningful that led many American writers to resist the medicalized body.

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing PDF Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199216819
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 439

Get Book Here

Book Description
Selected and introduced by Richard Dawkins, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a celebration of the finest writing by scientists for a wider audience - revealing that many of the best scientists have displayed as much imagination and skill with the pen as they have in the laboratory.This is a rich and vibrant collection that captures the poetry and excitement of communicating scientific understanding and scientific effort from 1900 to the present day. Professor Dawkins has included writing from a diverse range of scientists, some of whom need no introduction, and some of whoseworks have become modern classics, while others may be less familiar - but all convey the passion of great scientists writing about their science.

Sleep Fictions

Sleep Fictions PDF Author: Hannah L. Huber
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252055004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Get Book Here

Book Description
The literary response to the dawning cult of wakefulness A turn-of-the-century influx of new technologies and the enormous impact of the electric light transformed not only individual sleeping habits but the ways American culture conceived and valued sleep. Hannah L. Huber analyzes the works of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to examine the literary response to the period’s obsession with wakefulness. As these writers blurred the separation of public and private space, their characters faced exhaustion in a modern world that permeated every moment of their lives with artificial light, traffic noise, and the social pressure to remain active at all hours. The implacable cultural clock and constant stress over physical limitations had an even greater impact on marginalized figures. Huber pays particular attention to how these writers rebutted Americans’ confidence in the body’s ability to conquer sleep with vivid portraits of the devastating consequences of sleep disruption and deprivation. The author also provides a website and text visualization tool that offers readers an interdisciplinary, deconstructed analysis of the book’s primary texts. The website can be found at: https://sleepfictions.org/sleep/scalar/index

The Writing Cure

The Writing Cure PDF Author: Alexandra Lembert-Heidenreich
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643904029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
Medicine and literary studies are often thematically aligned, since the former can be understood as an interpretive science. Literary texts across all genres and time periods deal with medical issues that portray illness, patients' suffering/recovering, or doctors at work, thus pointing towards a deep-seated interest in the human condition. Enveloping the growing interdisciplinary field of medical humanities, this book examines the connections between medicine and fictional/non-fictional literature, from the Early Modern period to the most recent present from literary, medical, and cultural studies perspectives. (Series: Natural Sciences and Humanities in Dialogue / Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften im Dialog - Vol. 2)

Disaffected

Disaffected PDF Author: Xine Yao
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478022108
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Rural Fictions, Urban Realities

Rural Fictions, Urban Realities PDF Author: Mark Storey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190272422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study of late 19th-century American literature uses the period's rural fiction to reveal the increasingly intricate and sometimes problematic connections between urban and rural life.

A New Companion to Herman Melville

A New Companion to Herman Melville PDF Author: Wyn Kelley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119668506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 596

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ways in which Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated. In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hem­ispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers: A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville In-depth examinations of Melville's treatment of the natural world Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Anti-Jacobin Novels, Part I, Volume 4

Anti-Jacobin Novels, Part I, Volume 4 PDF Author: W M Verhoeven
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351223208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book Here

Book Description
A selection of Anti-Jacobin novels reprinted in full with annotations. The set includes works by male and female writers holding a range of political positions within the Anti-Jacobin camp, and represents the French Revolution, American Revolution, Irish Rebellion and political unrest in Scotland.

Health and Wellness in 19th-Century America

Health and Wellness in 19th-Century America PDF Author: John C. Waller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313380457
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive description of what being sick and receiving "medical care" was like in 19th-century America, allowing modern readers to truly appreciate the scale of the improvements in healthcare theory and practice. Health and Wellness in 19th-Century America covers a period of dramatic change in the United States by examining our changing understanding of the nature of the disease burden, the increasing size of the nation, and our conceptions of sickness and health. With topics ranging from the unsanitary tenements of New York's Five Points, the field hospitals of the Civil War, and to the laboratories of Johns Hopkins Medical School, author John C. Waller reveals a complex picture of tradition, discovery, innovation, and occasional spectacular success. This book draws upon an extensive literature to document sickness and wellness in environments like rural homesteads, urban East-coast slums, and the hastily built cities of the West. It provides a fascinating historical examination of a century in which Americans made giant strides in understanding disease yet also clung to traditional methods and ideas, charting how U.S. medical science gradually transformed from being a backwater to a world leader in the field.

Howling for Justice

Howling for Justice PDF Author: Rebecca Tillett
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816513384
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book is a collection of essays by international scholars celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Silko's novel, Almanac of the Dead, and addressing those ongoing demands for justice. It offers new responses to Almanac's sociocultural, historical, and political contexts, and includes a new interview with Silko in which she reflects on the twenty years since the novel's publication"--