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Nineteenth-Century French Studies
A unique historicist literary analysis of medical realism in fiction.— Marsha Terry Winter
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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 ...