Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

by Lawrence Rothfield

Book 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,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691029547
• ISBN13: 9780691029542
• Release Date: December 1994
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.3"