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Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine offers a new way of conceptualizing food in literature: not as social or cultural symbol but as an agent within a network of relationships between body and mind and between humans and environment. By analysing gastrointestinal health in medical, literary, and philosophical texts, this volume rethinks the intersections between literature and health in the nineteenth century and triggers new debates about France's relationship with food. Of relevance to scholars of literature and to historians and sociologists of science, food, and medicine, it will provide ideal reading for students of French Literature and Culture, History, Cultural Studies, and History of Science and Medicine, Literature and Science, Food Studies, and the Medical Humanities. Readers will be introduced to new ways of approaching digestion in this period and will gain appreciation of the powerful resources offered by nineteenth-century French writing in understanding the nature of connections between gut, mind, and environment and the impact of these connections on our status as human beings.
List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Digestion and human identity: Sand, Balzac, Flaubert
Chapter 2. 'Une poétique de rebut': re-thinking guts as interface
Chapter 3. Digestion and brain work in Zola and Huysmans
Chapter 4. Autointoxication theory: the gut-psyche-bacteria connection
Conclusion
About the author
Manon Mathias is Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow. Her research examines interactions between literature, science, and medicine in nineteenth-century France. She co-edited
Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and is the author of
Vision in the Novels of George Sand (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Summary
Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth Century French Literature and Medicine offers a new way of conceptualizing food in literature: not as social or cultural symbol but as an agent within a network of relationships between body and mind and between humans and environment.
