Vital signs : medical realism in nineteenth-century fiction / Lawrence Rothfield.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rothfield, Lawrence, 1956-

Series:

Literature in history (Princeton, N.J.)

Literature in history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English fiction.

Medicine in literature.

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

French fiction.

Comparative literature--English and French.

Comparative literature.

Comparative literature--French and English.

Physicians in literature.

Realism in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (254 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1992.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

ONE. Medicine and Mimesis: The Contours of a Configuration

TWO. Disarticulating Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Medicalization of the Real

THREE. Paradigms and Professionalism: Balzacian Realism in Discursive Context

FOUR. "A New Organ of Knowledge": Medical Organicism and the Limits of Realism in Middlemarch

FIVE. On the Realism/Naturalism Distinction: Some Archaeological Considerations

SIX. From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism

SEVEN. The Pathological Perspective: Clinical Realism's Decline and the Emergence of Modernist Counter-Discourse

EPILOGUE. Toward a New Historicist Methodology

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [193]-226) and index.

ISBN:

9786612751561

9781400817825

140081782X

9781400813223

1400813220

9781282751569

1282751565

9781400820689

1400820685

OCLC:

700688683