1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910798199103321

Autore

Wright Erika <1970->

Titolo

Reading for health : medical narratives and the nineteenth-century novel / / Erika Wright

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Athens, Ohio : , : Ohio University Press, , [2016]

©2016

ISBN

0-8214-4563-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (241 p.)

Collana

Series in Victorian studies

Disciplina

823/.8093561

Soggetti

English fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

Literature and medicine - Great Britain - History - 19th century

Medicine in literature

Great Britain

United Kingdom

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 and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: becoming patient readers -- pt. 1. Domestication -- Jane Austen's plots of prevention -- Health, identity, and narrative authority in Jane Eyre -- pt. 2. Isolation -- Quarantine, social theory, and Little Dorrit -- The omniscience of invalidism: The case of Harriet Martineau -- pt. 3. Professionalization -- Narrative competence and the family doctor in Gaskell's Wives and daughters -- Afterword: health in narrative medicine.

Sommario/riassunto

In Reading for Health, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Bront, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional "therapeutic" form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well a powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of "health," both in personal and



domestic-conduct and in the social interaction of the individual within the community.