Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Informationen zum Autor Katherine Byrne is Lecturer in English at the University of Ulster. Klappentext This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers. "Byrne's analysis in this book is generally well researched and well contextualized. Students and scholars alike should be grateful for the work here underpinning what is, overall, a rich and useful resource." --Victorian Studies Zusammenfassung This study examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction! analyzing consumptive characters for insights into how society viewed this 'dread disease' and its sufferers! and revealing the myths which surrounded this socially significant illness. It displays! also! how popular assumptions were used as diagnostic tools by a frustrated medical profession. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction; 1. Nineteenth-century medical discourse on pulmonary phthisis; 2. Consuming the family economy: disease and capitalism in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South; 3. The consumptive diathesis and the Victorian invalid in Mrs Humphry Ward's Eleanor; 4. 'There is beauty in woman's decay': the rise of the tubercular aesthetic; 5. Consumption and the Count: the pathological origins of Vampirism and Bram Stoker's Dracula; 6. 'A kind of intellectual advantage': phthisis and masculine identity in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady; Conclusion; Appendix A. Phthisis mortality; Appendix B. Medical publications on consumption; Appendix C. Gender distribution of phthisis.

Product details

• Authors: Katherine Byrne, Katherine (University of Ulster) Byrne, Byrne Katherine
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.11.2010
• EAN: 9780521766678
• ISBN: 978-0-521-76667-8
• No. of pages: 242
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; English, MEDICAL / History, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, History of Medicine, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form