Vital signs [[electronic resource] ] : medical realism in nineteenth-century fiction / / Lawrence Rothfield

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910782729103321
• Autore: Rothfield Lawrence <1956->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Princeton, N.J., : Princeton University Press, c1992
• ISBN: 1-4008-1782-X; 1-4008-1322-0; 1-282-75156-5; 9786612751561; 1-4008-2068-5
• Edizione: [Course Book]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (254 p.)
• Collana: Literature in history
• Disciplina: 823/.809356
• Soggetti: English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism; Medicine in literature; French fiction - 19th century - History and criticism; Comparative literature - English and French; Comparative literature - French and English; Physicians in literature; Realism in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [193]-226) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- PREFACE -- ONE. Medicine and Mimesis: The Contours of a Configuration -- TWO. Disarticulating Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Medicalization of the Real -- THREE. Paradigms and Professionalism: Balzacian Realism in Discursive Context -- FOUR. "A New Organ of Knowledge": Medical Organicism and the Limits of Realism in Middlemarch -- FIVE. On the Realism/Naturalism Distinction: Some Archaeological Considerations -- SIX. From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism -- SEVEN. The Pathological Perspective: Clinical Realism's Decline and the Emergence of Modernist Counter-Discourse -- EPILOGUE. Toward a New Historicist Methodology -- NOTES -- INDEX
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.