scholarly journals Diagnosis or Detour? The Uses of Medical Realism in the Victorian Novel

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Professional Ideology ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Realist Methodology ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Literary Techniques

AbstractThis essay attempts to open up our perspective on novels’ use of medical narrative realism. Previous analyses of “medicine and the novel” have focused on a common realist ideal and on novels with medical content. But even a realist methodology shared by the novel and by medicine did not find common expression in both genres. Accordingly, this paper draws on some examples that are representative of nineteenth-century novels and range from literal discussions of disease to scenes much farther removed from literal depictions of medicine or disease, but which still, I am arguing, draw on narrative techniques associated with medical clinical realism for their effect. In fact, novels revised and redirected such techniques, often using them against the grain of the professional ideology from which they arise. Accordingly, this essay will sketch out not only how medical case histories can use supposedly literary techniques, but also how nineteenth-century novels apply the narrative methods of clinical medicine even where medicine is not strictly at issue, and how they adapt those methods to their own literary aims.

Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara S Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Time Migration ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Social Invisibility ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Abstract This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strangers. In depicting migratory characters as embodiments of loneliness, while establishing it as a shared experience through parallel plots, nineteenth-century novels map out possible connections in a globalizing world. In parsing the interplay of isolation and imaginary sympathy in two texts of the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, I argue that the experience of feeling foreign while working abroad enables characters to seek connections that transcend boundaries of class and national identity, even as the sympathy they imagine might be flawed, warped by projection and identification. In Little Dorrit, Cavalletto’s accident in the streets of London enacts a pivotal moment of imagined sympathy for the recently returned Arthur Clennam that ultimately helps to solve the renegotiation of home and host country in the novel, while in Villette, a female migrant articulates an increasingly widespread experience not only of modern isolation, social invisibility, and cultural disorientation, but also of the power of anonymity. A critical analysis of migratory work in Victorian fiction adds an important new dimension to nineteenth-century global studies.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Remarkable Effect

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

scholarly journals On the Postmodern Narrative Techniques in Slaughterhouse-Five

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 553
Author(s):  
Jing Shi
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kurt Vonnegut ◽  
Narrative Approaches ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Kurt Vonnegut is admitted as a great master of postmodern writer. Vonnegut’s success is mainly attributed to his unique narrative approaches, various expressive methods and dramatic artistic effects. The application of metafiction is particularly obvious and significant in his novels. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of typical examples of the successful adoption of metafiction. The metafiction of Vonnegut’s style, applied in Slaughterhouse-Five, shows itself in three distinctive approaches—non-linear narrative, collage and parody. Based on postmodern narrative theory, the application of these three distinctive narrative techniques will be analyzed in details in this thesis. The analysis mainly includes the reasons why they are applied in the novel and the functions how they work. The paper is mainly divided into five parts. Relevant information of Vonnegut, postmodern metafiction and previous researches are introduced in the first chapter. After getting better acquainted with basic knowledge, three narrative methods of Vonnegut’s metafiction including non-linear narrative, collage and parody are separately and detailedly analyzed in the following three chapters. Every method applied in the novel deepens the anti-war theme, and then exposes war’s evilness and absurdity further. Finally, the last part is a conclusion which is an emphasis on effects of Vonnegut’s unique narrative techniques.

“Life is a tragicomedy!”: Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and the Staging of the Realist Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-176
Author(s):  
Terry F. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Maria Edgeworth ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
A Performance

This essay reveals how Maria Edgeworth integrated dramatic practices into her novel Belinda (1801) as a means to generate realistic effect. In doing so, it not only challenges the notion that the theater was at odds with the novel in this period but also shows that, in a novel such as Belinda, the theater fundamentally undergirds rather than detracts from its verisimilitude. As I demonstrate through careful readings of key “dramatic” scenes in the novel, Lady Delacour's adoption of the mask of the Comic Muse acts as a metonym for the mask of the novel—namely, those narrative techniques that provide the illusion of character depth and authenticity. The essay thus documents a foundational moment in the development of the nineteenth-century novel insofar as it discloses Edgeworth's contention that any novelistic move to establish subjective interiority is as much of a performance as a theatrical one; in other words, realism is theater.

THE GHOST IN THE CLINIC: GOTHIC MEDICINE AND CURIOUS FICTION IN SAMUEL WARREN'SDIARY OF A LATE PHYSICIAN

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case History ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Case Histories ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Vision

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novelPassages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

Aspects of the Novel

Russomania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 158-212
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
British Novel ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Modern British Literature ◽  
First World

This chapter addresses the debates about the future of the British novel in the years leading up the First World War. The initial focus is Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. By reading the magazine forward from the ‘Art of Fiction’ debates of the 1880s, rather than—as is usual—back through canonical modernism, we see how Ford deliberated staged comparisons between what he saw as the two distinct possibilities for the future of modern British literature: the ‘artists’ drawing on a French, specifically Flaubertian, tradition with which Ford aligned his own ‘impressionism’, and the ‘propagandists’ deriving from English and Russian nineteenth-century novels. The literary relevance of the anti-tsarist politics of the magazine is discussed, and the chapter concludes by analysing Joseph Conrad’s work of the period.

The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in Anne Brontëë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

2003 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Losano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Gradual Transition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Transition ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Critics of Anne Brontëë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) have frequently noted the artistic endeavors of the novel's heroine, Helen Graham, yet they have not fully considered the historical and narratological ramifications of Helen's career as a painter. This essay argues that Helen's artworks cannot be considered as mere background to the novel or as simply symbolic reflections of the heroine's (or the author's) emotions. Instead, we must see the scenes of painting in Tenant as indicators of the novel's radical view of women's role as creative producers during a particularly complex moment in art history, one in which early-nineteenth-century female amateurism began its gradual transition from amateur "accomplished" woman to the professional female artist——a historical transition that, as is suggested in readings of various nineteenth-century novels, is in its earliest stages at precisely the moment of the writing and publication of Tenant. At the narrative level, the novel's many scenes of painting provide its readers with detailed, if oblique, guidelines for interpretation; the novel is formally and ideologically impacted by the presence of its painter-heroine. Most particularly, such a reevaluation of the role of painting in the novel resolves a central critical debate over the novel's problematic narrative structure.

Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé and the Narrative of Popular Revolt

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-178
Author(s):  
Biliana Kassabova
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Jules Valles ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Communal Politics

In this article, I look at Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé to argue that its narrative style performs the politics of anonymity at the heart of the Paris Commune. To do this, I analyse three key elements of the novel – its autofictionality, its fragmentation and its ubiquitous present tense. By rejecting the exemplarity inherent in autobiography, this autofiction avant la lettre implies that the I of the narrator Jacques Vingtras, himself a stand-in for the author Jules Vallès, can be substituted with any other I. In the ‘révolution anonyme’ of 1871, there can be no leader; in its narrative, the central character is replaceable. The fragmentary writing further resists the unity of nineteenth-century novels to draw portraits of various actors of revolt; centralised revolution is abandoned in favour of communal politics. Finally, the narration in the present tense creates a sense of immediacy which rejects the glorification of the revolutionary past, and instead underscores the Paris Commune’s new politics in the making. The novel is thus enacting the ‘grande fédération des douleurs’ to which it is dedicated.

Worlds Enough

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As this book reveals, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, this book demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. The book analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. It concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, the book suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

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