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FICTIONS OF HEALTH: MEDICINE AND THE NINTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
by
Erika Wright
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2009
Copyright 2009 Erika Wright
Object Description
| Title | Fictions of health: medicine and the ninteenth-century novel |
| Author | Wright, Erika |
| Author email | wrighterika@gmail.com; ewright@usc.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2009-05-07 |
| Date submitted | 2009 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2009-08-06 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Schor, Hilary M. |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Kincaid, James R Boone, Jospeh Allen Levine, Philippa |
| Abstract | Since the rise of the novel, readers have been trained to expect conflict and resolution, crisis and recovery, and beginnings that move (but not too quickly) toward ends. Such patterns have been likened to disease: narrative begins in a state of dysfunction and works toward the recuperation of order or the presumably healthy state of quiescence. However, underlying this traditional structure, which is embedded in the medical and fictional texts I analyze, is another sense of narrative, one determined by the vagaries to be found within plots of health rather than an inexorable trajectory leading from illness to cure. For health is more than a mechanism of closure or an absence of narrative. Health is a precarious state marked by uncertain chronology, invented plots, and hopeful characters and provides writers with narrative possibilities rather than simply an ending, an ongoing drama rather than a condition of stasis.; Fictions of Health charts this unexpected relationship between health and the novel, beginning with the figure of the chronic invalid, who holds a privileged -- because detached -- perspective on what it means to be well. Invalidism provides a vital mode of narration through which health can be seen as a dynamic element of storytelling. In Chapter two, Austen’s Fanny Price both embodies invalid narration and marks, for the domestic novels that follow, the romantic trajectory toward health, which comes from the impulse not of cure but of prevention. By mid-century, as I show in Chapter three, Dickens creates social health when the characters in Little Dorrit find community and compassion in quarantine, offering therapeutic contagion rather than the prevention of disease; Gaskell’s Molly Gibson concludes this project by learning, through a kind of medical training, that novelistic acts, the caring attention of a sympathetic listener, rather than medical treatment, bring about what is truly narrative health. |
| Keyword | medicine; Victorian; narrative theory; prevention; invalid; doctor |
| Coverage date | 1800/1900 |
| Coverage era | Nineteenth Century |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2502 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Wright, Erika |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@dots.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Wright-2987 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume32/etd-Wright-2987.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@dots.usc.edu |
| Full text | FICTIONS OF HEALTH: MEDICINE AND THE NINTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL by Erika Wright A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY (ENGLISH) August 2009 Copyright 2009 Erika Wright |
