Rothfield Vital Signs

Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2068-9
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 252 Seiten

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 Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Medicine and Mimesis: The Contours of a Configuration 3

2 Disarticulating Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Medicalization of the Real 15

3 Paradigms and Professionalism: Balzacian Realism in Discursive Context 46

4 "A New Organ of Knowledge": Medical Organicism and the Limits of Realism in Middlemarch 84

5 On the Realism/Naturalism Distinction: Some Archaeological Considerations 120

6 From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism 130

7 The Pathological Perspective: Clinical Realism's Decline and the Emergence of Modernist Counter-Discourse 148

Epilogue: Toward a New Historicist Methodology 175

Notes 193

Index 227

Über Autor(innen)

Lawrence Rothfield is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.