Medical Storyworlds - Health, Illness, Bodies in Russian European Literature At Turn of

Elena Fratto examines the relationship between literature and medicine at the turn of the twentieth century. She traces how writers including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov responded to medical and public health prescriptions, arguing that they provide alternative ways of thinking about the limits and possibilities of human agency and free will.

List of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Grand Finale: Death as the Revelatory Ending
2. End of Story: Temporality and the Prospect of the Ending in Ivan Ilych, Anna Karenina, and (Potential) Cancer Patients
3. Medical Enlightenment in the Early 1920s: Rhetoric and Diffused Authorship in Jules Romains’s Knock and Soviet Public-Health Campaigns
4. Time, Agency, and Bodily Glands: Metabolic Storytelling in Italo Svevo and Mikhail Bulgakov
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Elena Fratto is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.

Summary

Elena Fratto examines the relationship between literature and medicine at the turn of the twentieth century. She traces how writers including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov responded to medical and public health prescriptions, arguing that they provide alternative ways of thinking about the limits and possibilities of human agency and free will.

Additional text

This elegant book stages nothing less than a Slavic studies intervention in medical humanities—and vice versa. In the process, Fratto draws myriad revelatory connections between the writings of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov, among others, and such present-day concerns as medical ethics, disability, posthumanism, and the Covid-19 pandemic. In short, Medical Storyworlds is a triumph.

Product details

• Authors: Elena Fratto
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.11.2021
• EAN: 9780231202336
• ISBN: 978-0-231-20233-6
• No. of pages: 272
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Russia, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Disease & Health Issues, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Illness & addiction: social aspects, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Health, illness and addiction: social aspects, Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe), USSR, Soviet Union, LITERARY CRITICISM / Russian & Soviet, Russian literary criticism; disease and health issues