Exploring the intersection of medicine, history, and literature, this anthology features a range of nineteenth-century works that illuminate the social realities of medical practice during a transformative era. It highlights themes such as professional hierarchy, the introduction of new medical instruments, the emergence of women doctors, and the evolving dynamics between physicians and patients. Notable authors like Anthony Trollope and Gustave Flaubert contribute to this collection, which also includes an overview of medical advancements and an annotated bibliography for further exploration.
"All is true," realist writers would say of their work, to which critics now respond: All is art and artifice. Offering a new approach to reading nineteenth-century realist fiction, Lilian R. Furst seeks to reconcile these contradictory claims. In doing so, she clarifies the deceptions, appropriations, intentions, and ultimately the power of literary realism.In close textual analyses of works ranging across European and American literature, including paradigmatic texts by Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Thomas Mann, Furst shows how the handling of time, the presentation of place, and certain narrational strategies have served the realists' claim. She demonstrates how readers today, like those a hundred years ago, are convinced of the authenticity of the created illusion by such means as framing, voice, perspective, and the slippage from metonymy to metaphor. Further, Furst reveals the pains the realists took to conceal these devices, and thus to protect their claim to be employing a simple form. Taking into account both the claims and the covert strategies of these writers, All Is True puts forward an alternative to the conventional polarized reading of the realist text--which emerges here as neither strictly an imitation of an extraneous model nor simply a web of words but a brilliantly complex imbrication of the two.A major statement on one of the most enduring forms in cultural history, this book promises to alter not only our view of realist fiction but our understanding of how we read it
Focusing on psychosomatic disorders, this study explores their representation in both medical literature and notable literary works from the 19th and 20th centuries. Analyzing six key texts, it delves into how hidden sources of physical ailments stem from complex intra- and interpersonal conflicts, including guilt and familial tensions. The selected works—ranging from Hawthorne to Barker—serve as case studies that reveal the intricate connections between emotional struggles and physical health.
First published in 1980. This collection of carefully selected extracts from primary texts seeks to show what the Romantics themselves held Romanticism to be. The movement is thus defined in terms of the writers' own views of their art both in general principle and in practical terms. This title will be of interest to students of literature.
