Lawrence Rothfield

Vital Signs

Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Januar 1995
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 421g
• ISBN-13: 9780691029542
• ISBN-10: 0691029547
• Artikelnr.: 21672419

Autorenporträt

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

Inhaltsangabe

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

Rezensionen

A unique historicist literary analysis of medical realism in fiction.