Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845-1915

Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845-1915

Davis, Cynthia J.

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0804737738
ISBN13: 9780804737739
Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
Published: Dec 1 2000
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

During the period of the professionalization of American medicine, many authors were concerned with a concurrent tendency to define identity in biological terms. Most of them doctors or patients themselves, they used literature polemically to convey their views about the meaning of the body and the origin and cure of disease. This book demonstrates that emergent medical beliefs about bodily functions and malfunctions surface in the writings of these authors not simply as thematic concerns but as problems for narrative form. Through a series of careful, historicized readings of works by a range of authors--including Louisa May Alcott, Charles W. Chesnutt, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances E. Watkins Harper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Pauline E. Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps--the book relates both the what and the how of representation to specific theories of embodiment emerging during this burgeoning yet awkward period of medical history.

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