Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

by Lawrence Rothfield

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Book Overview

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.

Format:Paperback

Language:English

ISBN:0691029547

ISBN13:9780691029542

Release Date:December 1994

Publisher:Princeton University Press

Length:252 Pages

Weight:0.95 lbs.

Dimensions:0.7" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Related Subjects

Literary Criticism Literary Criticism & Collections Philosophy

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Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

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