Vital Signs

Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Erscheinungsjahr 1995
ISBN: 978-0-691-02954-2
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 252 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 421 g

Reihe: Literature in History

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rothfield, Lawrence

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsPreface1Medicine and Mimesis: The Contours of a Configuration32Disarticulating Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Medicalization of the Real153Paradigms and Professionalism: Balzacian Realism in Discursive Context464"A New Organ of Knowledge": Medical Organicism and the Limits of Realism in Middlemarch845On the Realism/Naturalism Distinction: Some Archaeological Considerations1206From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism1307The Pathological Perspective: Clinical Realism's Decline and the Emergence of Modernist Counter-Discourse148Epilogue: Toward a New Historicist Methodology175Notes193Index227