Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

by Lawrence Rothfield

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 linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691029542
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1995
Series:	Literature in History
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

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

What People are Saying About This

Catherine Gallagher

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 Publisher

"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

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

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.

Victorian Studies - P. Melville Logan

A unique historicist literary analysis of medical realism in fiction.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies - Marsha Terry Winter

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.

Literature and Medicine - Rita Charon

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

A unique historicist literary analysis of medical realism in fiction.
— Marsha Terry Winter

Nineteenth-Century French Studies

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