Victorian Pain / Rachel Ablow.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ablow, Rachel, author.

Series:

Princeton series in applied mathematics.

Princeton Series in Applied Mathematics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Literature and society.

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

Literature and science.

Human body in literature.

Pain--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Pain.

Pain in literature.

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

English literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (207 pages).

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, Victorian Pain offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain.Rachel Ablow provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. She explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers.A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, Victorian Pain shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons-and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Pain, Subjectivity, and the Social

Chapter One. John Stuart Mill and the Poetics of Social Pain

Chapter Two. Harriet Martineau and the Impersonality of Pain

Chapter Three. Pain and Privacy in Villette

Chapter Four. Charles Darwin's Affect Theory

Chapter Five. Wounded Trees, Abandoned Boots

Afterword. The Fantasy of the Speaking Body

Notes

Words Cited

Index

A Note On the Type

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691202884

0691202885

OCLC:

985364845