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Somatic Fictions
This book focuses on the centrality of illness—particularly psychosomatic illness—as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture. It shows how illness shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public, and how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition.
Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction
Nervous illness and the study of how body and mind connected, were of intense interest to Victorian medical writers and novelists alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. Alongside detailed examinations of some of the era's most influential neurological and physiological theories, Jane Wood offers fresh readings of fictions by Charlotte Bront , George MacDonald, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing.
Of Lovely Tyrants and Invisible Women
This book examines images of female illness and invalidism as a metaphor of women's position of invisibility in Victorian and fin-de-siecle America, which pervade the fiction of the Virginia writer Ellen Glasgow (Richmond, 1873-1945). The study contends that the author explores the Victorian cult of invalidism to reveal the mechanisms of patriarchy: her novels warn against adhering to its values, since women are moulded to become epitomes of extreme delicacy and selflessness, being ultimately reduced to virtual inexistence. Many times physically incapacitating, Glasgow seems to suggest, the doctrine of female self-effacement always debilitates women's autonomy as human beings. The female invalids in Glasgow's fiction thus operate as uncanny mirrors of the self women become if they adhere to the traditional code of femininity and its adjoining principle of self-sacrifice.
A Mighty Baptism
Follows the influences of race and gender on the Protestant tradition in America from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.
Family Fictions
By revealing the investment of eighteenth-century British prose fiction in contemporary debates about domestic ideology, this book addresses the multiple ways in which traditional notions of the family were estranged, reconstituted as novel concepts, and then finally presented as national social norms. It focuses on works by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, Laurence Sterne, and Mary Wollstonecraft, addressing a number of narratives that historians of the novel have overlooked while linking such better-known works as Robinson Crusoe and Pamela to their often neglected sequels. Challenging competing critical claims that the household either experience...
Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing
Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth-century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.
Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds
Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally repre...
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability
Working across time periods and critical contexts, this volume provides the most comprehensive overview of literary representations of disability.
Theater Figures
Why did nineteenth-century novels return, over again, to the scene of theater? Emily Allen argues that theater provided nineteenth-century novels, novelists, and critics with a generic figure that allowed them to position particular novels and novelistic genres within a complex literary field. Novel genres high and low, male and female, public and private, realistic and romantic, all came to identify themselves within a set of coordinates that included--if only for the purpose of exclusion--the spectacular figure of theater. This figure likewise provided a trope around and against which to construct images of readers and authors, images that most frequently worked to mediate between the supp...
Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
This is a far-ranging study which contextualises both the historical figure of Harriet Jacobs and her autobiography as a created work of art.
