Vital Signs – Medical Realism in Nineteenth–Century Fiction (Literature in History) - Hardcover

Rothfield, L

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691068968 ISBN 13: 9780691068961

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1992

Synopsis

"Vital Signs" offers both a reinterpretation of the 19th-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He demonstrates in particular how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions and models of professional authority, and he traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction and modernism.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Rothfield is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

From the Back Cover

"An important reinterpretation of nineteenth-century realism. Its description of the novel's interrelationship with the discourse of clinical medicine clearly surpasses that of any other study in its precision, detail, and complexity."--Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley

From the Inside Flap

"An important reinterpretation of nineteenth-century realism. Its description of the novel's interrelationship with the discourse of clinical medicine clearly surpasses that of any other study in its precision, detail, and complexity."--Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691068968
• ISBN 13: 9780691068961
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260