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Author: Monika Pietrzak-Franger
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783319841830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.
Author: Monika Pietrzak-Franger
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783319841830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Get Book
Book Description
This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.
Author: Monika Pietrzak-Franger
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319495356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Get Book
Book Description
This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.
Author: Kari Nixon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319663674
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
This book demystifies the cultural work of syphilis from the late nineteenth century to the present. By interrogating the motivations that engender habits of belief, thought, and conduct regarding the disease and notions of the self, this interdisciplinary volume investigates constructions of syphilis that had a significant role in shaping modern subjectivity. Chapters draw from a variety of scholarly methods, such as cultural and literary studies, sociology, and anthropology. Authors unravel the representations and influence of syphilis in various cultural forms: cartography, medical writings, literature, historical periodicals, and contemporary popular discourses such as internet forums and electronic news media. Exploring the ways syphilitic rhetoric responds to, generates, or threatens social systems and cultural capital offers a method by which we can better understand the geographies of blame that are central to the conceptual heritage of the disease. This unique volume will appeal to students and scholars in the medical humanities, medical sociology, the history of medicine, and Victorian and modernist studies.
Author: Noelle Gallagher
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240767
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
A lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and artIn eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. In this book, literary critic Noelle Gallagher explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art.As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. Gallagher highlights four key concepts associated with the disease, demonstrating how the infection’s symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and nasal deformity. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.
Author: Katherine Byrne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521766672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.
Author: Lorenzo Servitje
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438481691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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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.
Author: Carolyn A. Day
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350009407
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there was a tubercular 'moment' in which perceptions of the consumptive disease became inextricably tied to contemporary concepts of beauty, playing out in the clothing fashions of the day. With the ravages of the illness widely regarded as conferring beauty on the sufferer, it became commonplace to regard tuberculosis as a positive affliction, one to be emulated in both beauty practices and dress. While medical writers of the time believed that the fashionable way of life of many women actually rendered them susceptible to the disease, Carolyn A. Day investigates the deliberate and widespread flouting of admonitions against these fashion practices in the pursuit of beauty. Through an exploration of contemporary social trends and medical advice revealed in medical writing, literature and personal papers, Consumptive Chic uncovers the intimate relationship between fashionable women's clothing, and medical understandings of the illness. Illustrated with over 40 full color fashion plates, caricatures, medical images, and photographs of original garments, this is a compelling story of the intimate relationship between the body, beauty, and disease - and the rise of 'tubercular chic'.
Author: Sibylle Baumbach
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030753972
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products ‘as they are’ and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces. This is an open access book.
Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108807542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.
Author: Mary Wilson Carpenter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031306542X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This work offers a social and cultural history of Victorian medicine "from below," as experienced by ordinary practitioners and patients, often described in their own words. Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England is a human story of medicine in 19th-century England. It's a story of how a diverse and competitive assortment of apothecary apprentices, surgeons who learned their trade by doing, and physicians schooled in ancient Greek medicine but lacking in any actual experience with patients, was gradually formed into a medical profession with uniform standards of education and qualification. It's a story of how medical men struggled with "new" diseases such as cholera and "old" ones known for centuries, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox, largely in the absence of effective drugs or treatments, and so were often reduced to standing helplessly by as their patients died. It's a story of how surgeons, empowered first by anesthesia and later by antiseptic technique, vastly expanded the field of surgery—sometimes with major benefits for patients, but sometimes with disastrous results. Above all, it's a story of how gender and class ideology dominated both practitioners and patients. Women were stridently excluded from medical education and practice of any kind until the end of the century, but were hailed into the new field of nursing, which was felt to be "natural" to the gentler sex. Only the poor were admitted to hospitals until the last decades of the century, and while they often received compassionate care, they were also treated as "cases" of disease and experimented upon with freedom. Yet because medical knowledge was growing by leaps and bounds, Victorians were fascinated with this new field and wrote novels, poetry, essays, letters, and diaries, which illuminate their experience of health and disease for us. Newly developed techniques of photography, as well as improved print illustrations, help us to picture this fascinating world. This vivid history of Victorian medicine is enriched with many literary examples and visual images drawn from the period.
