E-Book Overview
In this exploration of the significance of illness in the Victorian literary imagination Miriam Bailin maps the cultural implications and narrative effects of the sickroom as an important symbolic space in nineteenth-century life and literature. Dr Bailin draws on non-fictional accounts of illness by Julia Stephen, Harriet Martineau and others to illuminate the presentation of illness and ministration, patient and nurse, in the fiction of Charlotte Bront?, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. She argues that the sickroom functions as an imagined retreat from conflicts in Victorian society, and that fictional representations of illness serve to resolve both social conflict and aesthetic tension. Her concentration on the sickroom scene as a compositional response to insistent formal as well as social problems yields fresh readings of canonical works and approaches to the constituent elements of Victorian realist narrative.
E-Book Content
In this exploration of the significance of illness in the Victorian literary imagination, Miriam Bailin maps the cultural implications and narrative effects of the sickroom as an important symbolic space in nineteenth-century life and literature. Dr Bailin draws on non-fictional accounts of illness by Julia Stephen, Harriet Martineau, and others to illuminate the presentation of illness and ministration, patient and nurse in the fiction of Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. She argues that the sickroom functions as an imagined retreat from conflicts in Victorian society, and that fictional representations of illness serve to resolve both social conflict and aesthetic tension. Her concentration on the sickroom scene as a compositional response to insistent formal as well as social problems yields fresh readings of canonical works and new approaches to the constituent elements of Victorian realist narrative.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE I
THE SICKROOM IN VICTORIAN FICTION
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE General editors Gillian Beer, Girton College, Cambridge Catherine Gallagher, University of California Berkeley Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London Terry Eagleton, St Catherine's College, Oxford Leonore Davidoff, University of Essex D. A. Miller, Harvard University J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Mary Poovey, The Johns Hopkins University Elaine Showalter, Princeton University
Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been a rich field for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organizations, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought - in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly syntheses and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as "background", feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have re-animated the field. This new series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. Titles published
The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction The Art of Being 111 by Miriam Bailin, Washington University Muscular Christianity Embodying the Victorian Age edited by Donald E. Hall, Californ