Synopses & Reviews
Janis McLarren Caldwell investigates the impact of medical science and the Romantic interest in material culture on nineteenth-century literature.
Review
"[a] broad-ranging and inventive engagement ... [a] very interesting and valuable contribution to the field of literature and medicine."
Victorian Studies
Synopsis
Janis Caldwell investigates the links between the growing scientific materialism of the nineteenth century and the persistence of the Romantic literary imagination. Through closely analyzing literary texts from Frankenstein to Middlemarch, and examining fiction alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Caldwell argues that the way Romantic materialism influenced these disciplines compels us to revise conventional accounts of the relationship between literature and medicine.
Synopsis
Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, clinical medicine and the natural and supernatural obsessions of Romantic literature emerged out of the same cultural configurations. Janis McLarren Caldwell investigates the links between the emerging narrative diagnoses of the nineteenth century and the Romantic literary imagination. Through close analysis of literary texts from Frankenstein to Middlemarch, and by examining fiction alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers.
About the Author
Janis McLarren Caldwell practiced emergency medicine for five years before pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature. She now teaches literature and science at Wake Forest University, where she is an Assistant Professor of English. An expert in nineteenth-century literature and medicine, she has received grants for research at Cambridge University and at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction; 2. Science and sympathy in Frankenstein; 3. Natural supernaturalism in Thomas Carlyle and Richard Owen; 4. Wuthering Heights and domestic medicine: the child's body and the book; 5. Literalization in the novels of Charlotte Brontë; 6. Charles Darwin and Romantic medicine; 7. Doctors and patients, then and now; Bibliography; Index.