Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian CultureStanford University Press, 1995 - 250 pages 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 Haggard she explores the historical assumptions, patterns of perception, and structures of belief that invested sick and heat with cultural meaning. 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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Alcott Alice Alice James Allan Quatermain argued audience Ayesha bodily body Brontë Caroline's century chapter claims contagion Cousin Phillis criminal critical Daniel Deronda death Densher discussion doctors Dracula drama Eliot emotional emphasized evolutionary female feminine Feminism feminist fiction fitness gaze gender George Eliot Gwendolen's Haggard hermeneutic heroines human hypnosis hysteria hysterical ical ideal identity ideological imaginative imperial imperialist interpretation James James's language literary Lombroso Lucy Lucy's male masculine medical gaze medicine Meredith metaphors Middlemarch Milly Milly's moral narrative nerves nervous disease nervous illness neurasthenia neuromimesis neurosis nineteenth nineteenth-century novel nursing pain patient physical physician potential psychology racial reader reading relationship rhetoric role scene scientific sensitivity sentimental sexual Sir Luke social social Darwinism somatic specular spiritual Stoker suggest Susan Svengali symbolic sympathy symptoms theory tion Trilby Uncle Tom's Cabin University Press Van Helsing Victorian culture Villette vision visual Willoughby's woman women York