Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination PDF Author: Katherine Byrne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521766672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination PDF Author: Katherine Byrne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521766672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.

Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature

Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature PDF Author: Alex Tankard
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319714465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Until the nineteenth century, consumptives were depicted as sensitive, angelic beings whose purpose was to die beautifully and set an example of pious suffering – while, in reality, many people with tuberculosis faced unemployment, destitution, and an unlovely death in the workhouse. Focusing on the period 1821-1912, in which modern ideas about disease, disability, and eugenics emerged to challenge Romanticism and sentimentality, Invalid Lives examines representations of nineteenth-century consumptives as disabled people. Letters, self-help books, eugenic propaganda, and press interviews with consumptive artists suggest that people with tuberculosis were disabled as much by oppressive social structures and cultural stereotypes as by the illness itself. Invalid Lives asks whether disruptive consumptive characters in Wuthering Heights, Jude the Obscure, The Idiot, and Beatrice Harraden’s 1893 New Woman novel Ships That Pass in the Night represented critical, politicised models of disabled identity (and disabled masculinity) decades before the modern disability movement.

Consumptive Chic

Consumptive Chic PDF Author: Carolyn A. Day
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350009407
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there was a tubercular 'moment' in which perceptions of the consumptive disease became inextricably tied to contemporary concepts of beauty, playing out in the clothing fashions of the day. With the ravages of the illness widely regarded as conferring beauty on the sufferer, it became commonplace to regard tuberculosis as a positive affliction, one to be emulated in both beauty practices and dress. While medical writers of the time believed that the fashionable way of life of many women actually rendered them susceptible to the disease, Carolyn A. Day investigates the deliberate and widespread flouting of admonitions against these fashion practices in the pursuit of beauty. Through an exploration of contemporary social trends and medical advice revealed in medical writing, literature and personal papers, Consumptive Chic uncovers the intimate relationship between fashionable women's clothing, and medical understandings of the illness. Illustrated with over 40 full color fashion plates, caricatures, medical images, and photographs of original garments, this is a compelling story of the intimate relationship between the body, beauty, and disease - and the rise of 'tubercular chic'.

Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture

Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Monika Pietrzak-Franger
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319495356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.

Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England

Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England PDF Author: Mary Wilson Carpenter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031306542X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This work offers a social and cultural history of Victorian medicine "from below," as experienced by ordinary practitioners and patients, often described in their own words. Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England is a human story of medicine in 19th-century England. It's a story of how a diverse and competitive assortment of apothecary apprentices, surgeons who learned their trade by doing, and physicians schooled in ancient Greek medicine but lacking in any actual experience with patients, was gradually formed into a medical profession with uniform standards of education and qualification. It's a story of how medical men struggled with "new" diseases such as cholera and "old" ones known for centuries, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox, largely in the absence of effective drugs or treatments, and so were often reduced to standing helplessly by as their patients died. It's a story of how surgeons, empowered first by anesthesia and later by antiseptic technique, vastly expanded the field of surgery—sometimes with major benefits for patients, but sometimes with disastrous results. Above all, it's a story of how gender and class ideology dominated both practitioners and patients. Women were stridently excluded from medical education and practice of any kind until the end of the century, but were hailed into the new field of nursing, which was felt to be "natural" to the gentler sex. Only the poor were admitted to hospitals until the last decades of the century, and while they often received compassionate care, they were also treated as "cases" of disease and experimented upon with freedom. Yet because medical knowledge was growing by leaps and bounds, Victorians were fascinated with this new field and wrote novels, poetry, essays, letters, and diaries, which illuminate their experience of health and disease for us. Newly developed techniques of photography, as well as improved print illustrations, help us to picture this fascinating world. This vivid history of Victorian medicine is enriched with many literary examples and visual images drawn from the period.

Victorian Contagion

Victorian Contagion PDF Author: Chung-jen Chen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000691543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination examines the literary and cultural production of contagion in the Victorian era and the way that production participated in a moral economy of surveillance and control. In this book, I attempt to make sense of how the discursive practice of contagion governed the interactions and correlations between medical science, literary creation, and cultural imagination. Victorians dealt with the menace of contagion by theorizing a working motto in claiming the goodness and godliness in cleanliness which was theorized, realized, and radicalized both through practice and imagination. The Victorian discourse around cleanliness and contagion, including all its treatments and preventions, developed into a culture of medicalization, a perception of surveillance, a politics of health, an economy of morality, and a way of thinking. This book is an attempt to understands the literary and cultural elements which contributed to fear and anticipation of contagion, and to explain why and how these elements still matter to us today.

Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture

Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Deborah Lutz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316240711
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century Britons treasured objects of daily life that had once belonged to their dead. The love of these keepsakes, which included hair, teeth, and other remains, speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, which is less widely felt today. Deborah Lutz analyzes relic culture as an affirmation that objects held memories and told stories. These practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life - not as memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings. In a consumer culture in full swing by the 1850s, keepsakes of loved ones stood out as non-reproducible, authentic things whose value was purely personal. Through close reading of the works of Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others, this study illuminates the treasuring of objects that had belonged to or touched the dead.

Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence

Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence PDF Author: Sarah Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108918123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Can sexual restraint be good for you? Many Victorians thought so. This book explores the surprisingly positive construction of sexual restraint in an unlikely place: late nineteenth-century Decadence. Reading Decadent texts alongside Victorian writing about sexual health, including medical literature, adverts, advice books, and periodical articles, it identifies an intellectual Paterian tradition of sensuous continence, in which 'healthy' pleasure is distinguished from its 'harmful' counterpart. Recent work on Decadent sexuality concentrates on transgression and subversion, with restraint interpreted ahistorically as evidence of repression/sublimation or queer coding. Here Sarah Green examines the work of Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore to outline a co-extensive alternative approach to sexuality where restraint figured as a productive part of the 'aesthetic life', or a practical ethics shaped by aesthetic principles. Attending to this tradition reveals neglected connections within and beyond Decadence, bringing fresh perspective to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception.

The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession

The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession PDF Author: Richard Salmon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107435277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Richard Salmon provides an original account of the formation of the literary profession during the late Romantic and early Victorian periods. Focusing on the representation of authors in narrative and iconographic texts, including novels, biographies, sketches and portrait galleries, Salmon traces the emergence of authorship as a new form of professional identity from the 1820s to the 1850s. Many first-generation Victorian writers, including Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Martineau and Barrett-Browning, contributed to contemporary debates on the 'Dignity of Literature', professional heroism, and the cultural visibility of the 'man of letters'. This study combines a broad mapping of the early Victorian literary field with detailed readings of major texts. The book argues that the key model of professional development within this period is embodied in the narrative form of literary apprenticeship, which inspired such celebrated works as David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh, and that its formative process is the 'disenchantment of the author'.

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction

Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Matthew Sussman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108832946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Offers a deep history of style in theory and practice that transforms our understanding of style in the novel.