Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction PDF Author: Abigail Boucher
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031411412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Science, Medicine, and Lineage in Popular Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watched for signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction PDF Author: Abigail Boucher
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031411412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Science, Medicine, and Lineage in Popular Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watched for signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.

Reading Habits in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Reading Habits in the COVID-19 Pandemic PDF Author: Abigail Boucher
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031527534
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description


Medicine Is War

Medicine Is War PDF Author: Lorenzo Servitje
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438481691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as "the war against the coronavirus," "the front lines of the Ebola crisis," "a new weapon against antibiotic resistance," or "the immune system fights cancer" without considering their assumptions, implications, and history. But there is nothing natural about this language. It does not have to be, nor has it always been, the way to understand the relationship between humans and disease. Medicine Is War shows how this "martial metaphor" was popularized throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing on the works of Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad, Lorenzo Servitje examines how literary form reflected, reinforced, and critiqued the convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture. He considers how, in migrating from military medicine to the civilian sphere, this metaphor responded to the developments and dangers of modernity: urbanization, industrialization, government intervention, imperial contact, crime, changing gender relations, and the relationship between the one and the many. While cultural and literary scholars have attributed the metaphor to late nineteenth-century germ theory or immunology, this book offers a new, more expansive history stretching from the metaphor's roots in early nineteenth-century militarism to its consolidation during the rise of early twentieth-century pharmacology. In so doing, Servitje establishes literature's pivotal role in shaping what war has made thinkable and actionable under medicine's increasing jurisdiction in our lives. Medicine Is War reveals how, in our own moment, the metaphor remains conducive to harming as much as healing, to control as much as empowerment.

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Lisa Rodensky
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199533148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 829

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature

The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature PDF Author: David Hillman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316299007
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This Companion offers the first systematic analysis of the representation of the body in literature. It historicizes embodiment by charting our evolving understanding of the body from the Middle Ages to the present day, and addresses such questions as sensory perception, technology, language and affect; maternal bodies, disability and the representation of ageing; eating and obesity, pain, death and dying; and racialized and posthuman bodies. This Companion also considers science and its construction of the body through disciplines such as obstetrics, sexology and neurology. Leading scholars in the field devote special attention to poetry, prose, drama and film, and chart a variety of theoretical understandings of the body.

East Lynne

East Lynne PDF Author: Mrs. Henry Wood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description


The Most Dreadful Visitation

The Most Dreadful Visitation PDF Author: Valerie Pedlar
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 0853238391
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The 'Most Dreadful Visitation.' This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson's Maud, Wilkie Collins's Basil, and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings--and fears--of mental degeneracy.An Open Access edition of this work is available on the OAPEN Library.

Literature and Science

Literature and Science PDF Author: Alice Jenkins
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843841789
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Essays exploring the complex relationship between literature and science.

A Splendid Sin

A Splendid Sin PDF Author: Grant Allen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description


British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1

British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1 PDF Author: Adrienne E. Gavin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319782266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s inaugurates the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women’s writing distinctly within the 1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary history, feminist approaches, disability studies, and the history of reading, the volume’s 16 original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, and the development of crime and sensation writing. Centrally, it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary landscape of the 1840s and 1850s.