Ablow explores the idea of pain in Victorian thought and literature, navigating between understanding pain as private, incommunicable, and pre-social (theorized most prominently in Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, CH, Jan'86) and theories of pain as mediated by language and produced through social life.
Choice Victorian Pain is a clear-eyed, beautifully written investigation of the role and uses ... Read moreof pain in the work of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Bront , Charles Darwin and Thomas Hardy. . . . No one who is fortunate enough to read this book will look at the works it discusses in the same way again.
Times Literary Supplement Breathtakingly original. Victorian Pain is erudite, vastly informed, yet utterly readable.
Adela Pinch, author of Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing Victorian Pain provides a needed example of the rewards of philosophically informed literary criticism, one that should encourage other scholars and students to greater ambition and independence of thought. Finding intellectual inspiration in unusual places, Ablow has crafted a convincing and widely resonant argument.
Andrew H. Miller, author of The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature With distinctive and insightful readings of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Bront , Thomas Hardy, and others, Rachel Ablow's Victorian Pain eloquently makes the case that in the nineteenth century literature and philosophy offered indirect, subtle, and ultimately transformative ways to represent shareable pain
thereby making a nonatomistic liberalism imaginable.
John Plotz, author of Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move Show Less