Record Nr.

UNINA9910552750103321

Autore

Hingston Kylee-Anne

Titolo

Articulating bodies : the narrative form of disability and illness in Victorian fiction / / Kylee-Anne Hingston [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa


Liverpool : , : Liverpool University Press, , 2019

ISBN

1-78962-949-7

1-78962-495-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (x, 221 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Representations: health, disability, culture and society

Disciplina

823/.8093561

Soggetti

English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

Disabilities in literature

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 13 Jul 2020).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Sommario/riassunto

Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability's medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction's form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen.