The doctor in the Victorian novel : family practices / Tabitha Sparks.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sparks, Tabitha.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English fiction.

Physicians in literature.

Medicine in literature.

Marriage in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (187 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate Pub., 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Following the decline of the marriage plot in Victorian novels by a range of novelists, including Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George MacDonald, and Bram Stoker, Tabitha Sparks argues that a narrative's stance towards scientific reason is revealed in the figure of the doctor. Novels with romantic doctors deny the authority of empiricism, while those with clinically minded doctors uphold the determining logic of science and threaten the novel's romantic plot.

Contents:

Cover; Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Doctoring the Marriage Plot: Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook and George Eliot's Middlemarch; 2 Textual Healing: George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart; 3 Marital Malpractice at Mid-Century: Braddon's The Doctor's Wife and Gaskell's Wives and Daughters; 4 Myopic Medicine and Far-Sighted Femininity: Wilkie Collins's Armadale and Heart and Science; 5 New Women, Avenging Doctors: Gothic Medicine in Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen; 6 The "Fair Physician": Female Doctors and the Late-Century Marriage Plot

Conclusion - "The Overstimulated Nerve Ceases to Respond": Arthur Conan Doyle's Medical ModernismBibliography; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-315-61564-9

1-317-03541-0

1-317-03540-2

1-282-29517-9

9786612295171

0-7546-9640-5

9781315615646

OCLC:

464188180