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Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-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 shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.
| Acknowledgments | ||
| Preface | ||
| 1 | Medicine and Mimesis: The Contours of a Configuration | 3 |
| 2 | Disarticulating Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Medicalization of the Real | 15 |
| 3 | Paradigms and Professionalism: Balzacian Realism in Discursive Context | 46 |
| 4 | "A New Organ of Knowledge": Medical Organicism and the Limits of Realism in Middlemarch | 84 |
| 5 | On the Realism/Naturalism Distinction: Some Archaeological Considerations | 120 |
| 6 | From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism | 130 |
| 7 | The Pathological Perspective: Clinical Realism's Decline and the Emergence of Modernist Counter-Discourse | 148 |
| Epilogue: Toward a New Historicist Methodology | 175 | |
| Notes | 193 | |
| Index | 227 |
Overview
Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-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 shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the ...