Reading for health : medical narratives and the nineteenth-century novel / Erika Wright.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wright, Erika, 1970- author.

Series:

Series in Victorian Studies

Series in Victorian studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Literature and medicine--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Literature and medicine.

Great Britain.

History.

Medicine in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

x, 229 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, [2016]

Summary:

In Reading for Health, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional "therapeutic" form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well a powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of "health," both in personal and domestic-conduct and in the social interaction of the individual within the community. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: becoming patient readers

pt. 1. Domestication

Jane Austen's plots of prevention

Health, identity, and narrative authority in Jane Eyre

pt. 2. Isolation

Quarantine, social theory, and Little Dorrit

The omniscience of invalidism: The case of Harriet Martineau

pt. 3. Professionalization

Narrative competence and the family doctor in Gaskell's Wives and daughters

Afterword: health in narrative medicine.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780821422243

0821422243

OCLC:

932003510