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Athena Vrettos - Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture - 9780804724241 - V9780804724241
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Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture

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Description for Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture Hardback. .

Somatic Fictions focuses on the centrality of illness—particularly psycho-somatic illness—as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture, emphasizing how it shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public. Vrettos uses nineteenth-century fiction, diaries, medical treatises, and health advice manuals to examine how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition. Tracing the concept of illness in the work of a variety of novelists—Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Meredith, Bram Stoker, and H. Rider ... Read more

Illness, with its power to make one's body seem alien, or to link disparate groups of people through contagion, suggested to Victorians the potential instability of social and biological identities. Displacing chaotic social issues onto matters of physiology, they managed a variety of social issues, including questions of race, imperialism, anthropometry, and health. This book explores how Victorian narrative registers fears of psychic and somatic permeability, sympathetic identification with another's pain, and conflicting measures of racial and cultural fitness.

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Product Details

Publisher
Stanford University Press United States
Number of pages
264
Format
Hardback
Publication date
1995
Condition
New
Number of Pages
264
Place of Publication
Palo Alto, United States
ISBN
9780804724241
SKU
V9780804724241
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15

Reviews for Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture
"Vretto's purpose in this thoroughly researched and extensively documented study is 'to analyze the complex interaction between 19th-Century medical theory and narrative discourse'. . . . Vretto's reading includes a wide range of materials (particularly nonliterary texts). An impressive work of both scholarship and criticism."—Choice

Goodreads reviews for Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture


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