Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Victorian Pain is a clear-eyed, beautifully written investigation of the role and uses of pain in the work of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin and Thomas Hardy. . . . No one who is fortunate enough to read this book will look at the works it discusses in the same way again." * Times Literary Supplement *
"Ablow explores the idea of pain in Victorian thought and literature, navigating between understanding pain as private, incommunicable, and pre-social (theorized most prominently in Elaine Scarry's
The Body in Pain, CH, Jan'86) and theories of pain as mediated by language and produced through social life." * Choice *
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments ix Introduction Pain, Subjectivity, and the Social 1 1 John Stuart Mill and the Poetics of Social Pain 24 2 Harriet Martineau and the Impersonality of Pain 48 3 Pain and Privacy in Villette 72 4 Charles Darwin's Affect Theory 93 5 Wounded Trees, Abandoned Boots 114 Afterword The Fantasy of the Speaking Body 135 Notes 141 Works Cited 173 Index 187
