Somatic Fictions

This book focuses on the centrality of illness - particularly psychosomatic illness - as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture, emphasising how it shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public. The author uses nineteenth-century fiction, diaries, medical treatises, and health advice manuals to examine how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition. Tracing the concept of illness in the fiction of a variety of authors - Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Meredith, Bram Stoker, and H. Rider Haggard - Vrettos shows how Victorians attempted to manage diffuse and chaotic social issues by displacing them on to matters of physiology.

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"Vretto's purpose in this thoroughly researched and extensively documented study is 'to analyze the complex interaction between 19th-Century medical theory and narrative discourse'. . . . Vretto's reading includes a wide range of materials (particularly nonliterary texts). An impressive work of both scholarship and criticism."--"Choice"

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Introduction; 1. Body language and the poetics of illness; 2. From neurosis to narrative: the private life of the nerves; 3. Neuromimesis and the medical gaze; 4. The national health: defining and defending bodily boundaries; Conclusion.

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