Search results for ""Author Laurence Talairach""
University of Wales Press Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764-1897
The Gothic has always been fascinated with objects carrying with them a sense of horror - the decomposing body, the rigid corpse, the bleeding statue, the spectral skeleton - capable of creating a sublime form of beauty. Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764-1897 offers an exploration of those Gothic tropes and conventions which were most thoroughly steeped in the anatomical culture of the period - from skeletons, used to understand human anatomy, to pathological human remains exhibited in medical museums; from bodysnatching aimed at providing dissection subjects to live-burials resulting from medical misdiagnosis and pointing to contemporary research into the signs of death. The historicist reading of canonical and less known Gothic texts which is proposed throughout Gothic Remains, explored through the prism of anatomy, seeks to offer new insights into the ways in which medical practice and the medical sciences informed the aesthetics of pain and death typically read therein, and the two-way traffic that emerged between medical literature and literary texts.
£63.00
University of Wales Press Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic
This book examines how Wilkie Collins's interest in medical matters developed in his writing through explorations of his revisions of the late eighteenth century Gothic novel, from his first sensation novels to his last novels of the 1880s. Throughout his career, Collins made changes in the prototypical Gothic scenario. The aristocratic villains, victimized maidens and medieval castles of classic Gothic tales were reworked and adapted to thrill his Victorian readership. With the advances of neuroscience and the development of criminology as a significant backdrop to most of his novels, Collins drew upon contemporary anxieties and used the medical more and more to propel his criminal plots. While the archetypal castles were turned into modern medical institutions, his heroines no longer feared ghosts but the scientist's knife. This study underlines the way in which Collins's Gothic adaptations increasingly tackled medical questions, using the medical terrain to capitalize on the readers' fears. It demonstrates how Wilkie Collins's fiction revised Gothic themes and presented them through the prism of contemporary scientific, medical and psychological discourses, from debates revolving around mental physiology to those dealing with heredity and transmission. The book's structure is chronological, covering a selection of texts in each chapter; with a balance between discussion of the more canonical of Collins's texts, such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale, and some of his more neglected writings.
£45.00
