Description
Book SynopsisOffers both reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, this title argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices.
Trade Review"Vital Signs fulfills some of the urgent needs of literature and medicine as a discipline through its rigorous historical and intellectual scholarship, its perceptive close readings of several texts in the canon of literature and medicine, and its challenging assertions of the intimacy between clinical medicine and realism."--Rita Charon, Literature and Medicine "A unique historicist literary analysis of medical realism in fiction."--Marsha Terry Winter, Nineteenth-Century French Studies "Vital Signs is a careful investigation of medical modes of thinking in the nineteenth century and their relationship to the Victorian realist novel... of vital interest to anyone concerned with realism as a literary form... an impressive work of cultural history... Vital Signs has opened up a significant new approach to the issue of realism, and one that is argued persuasively in an unusually thorough and well-designed study."--P. Melville Logan, Victorian Studies
Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsPreface1Medicine and Mimesis: The Contours of a Configuration32Disarticulating Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Medicalization of the Real153Paradigms and Professionalism: Balzacian Realism in Discursive Context464"A New Organ of Knowledge": Medical Organicism and the Limits of Realism in Middlemarch845On the Realism/Naturalism Distinction: Some Archaeological Considerations1206From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism1307The Pathological Perspective: Clinical Realism's Decline and the Emergence of Modernist Counter-Discourse148Epilogue: Toward a New Historicist Methodology175Notes193Index227
