1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910743699903321

Autore

Boucher Abigail

Titolo

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction / / by Abigail Boucher

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2023

ISBN

9783031411410

3031411412

Edizione

[1st ed. 2023.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (x, 237 pages.)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, , 2634-6443

Disciplina

060

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 19th century

Fiction

Medicine and the humanities

Science - History

Celebrities

Great Britain - History

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Fiction Literature

Medical Humanities

History of Science

Celebrity Studies

History of Britain and Ireland

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- Chapter 1: Fashionable Diseases: Consumerism, Class, and Health in the Silver Fork Novels -- Chapter 2: “Unblessed by Offspring”: Fertility and the Aristocratic Male in Reynolds’s The Mysteries of the Court of London -- Chapter 3: Aristocratic Inbreeding: Exogamy and Endogamy in Sensation Fiction -- Chapter 4: Aristocratic Origins, Heredity, and Evolution in the Fin de Siècle Medieval Revival -- Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and



scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watchedfor signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.