Vital Signs by Lawrence Rothfield
"Vital Signs" offers both a reinterpretation of the 19th-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 demonstrates in particular how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions and models of professional authority, and he traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction and modernism.
"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
"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
Lawrence Rothfield is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780691068961 |
| ISBN 10 | 0691068968 |
| Title | Vital Signs |
| Author | Lawrence Rothfield |
| Series | Literature In History |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
| Year published | 1992-04-06 |
| Number of pages | 260 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |