Abigail Boucher – författare

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watchedfor signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watchedfor signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watchedfor signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.

This book presents and analyses the results of the Lockdown Library Project survey, using a range of quantitative and qualitative approaches to provide a unique insight into the ways in which the first UK COVID-19 lockdown affected public reading habits. The authors begin by outlining the background to the study, the research methodology and design, and an overview of the headlines of the data, before going on to survey the literature on the relationship between pandemics, literature (especially the role played by genre and popular fiction) and reading habits. They then examine how participants reported that the lockdown period had affected the amount that they read; how they accessed books and discussed their reading with others; the use of reading as a coping strategy; and returning to re-read books that offered familiarity, reliability, and nostalgia. Finally, the concluding chapter brings together the overall findings of the project and briefly outlines future work in the field. This book will be of interest to academics in fields such as literary and genre studies, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics, health humanities, and sociology, as well as practitioners working in education, in bibliotherapy, and in libraries.

This book presents and analyses the results of the Lockdown Library Project survey, using a range of quantitative and qualitative approaches to provide a unique insight into the ways in which the first UK COVID-19 lockdown affected public reading habits. The authors begin by outlining the background to the study, the research methodology and design, and an overview of the headlines of the data, before going on to survey the literature on the relationship between pandemics, literature (especially the role played by genre and popular fiction) and reading habits. They then examine how participants reported that the lockdown period had affected the amount that they read; how they accessed books and discussed their reading with others; the use of reading as a coping strategy; and returning to re-read books that offered familiarity, reliability, and nostalgia. Finally, the concluding chapter brings together the overall findings of the project and briefly outlines future work in the field. This book will be of interest to academics in fields such as literary and genre studies, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics, health humanities, and sociology, as well as practitioners working in education, in bibliotherapy, and in libraries.

This book draws upon genre fiction studies, forensic linguistics, and media studies to investigate the overlap between crime fiction conventions and the writing of missing persons appeals to the public. This book is based on a pilot project funded by the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, entitled 'Genre, Pacing, and Narrative in Police Missing Persons Appeals' (Aug 2021-Nov 2022). The authors identify a missing persons appeal as a literary and linguistic genre in its own right and illustrate the problems that arise when the appeals writing process goes unregulated or unstudied: there is currently little-to-no official, national police guidance, regulation, or standard procedure for writing a missing persons appeal in the UK. The authors also identify opportunities for improving the writing and delivery of appeals by further (and more intentionally) applying crime fiction conventions, narrative devices, and pacing, to maximise audience reach and increase the chances of recovering a missing person. This book will be of particular interest to genre fiction scholars (particularly those interested in crime fiction), forensic linguists, and media studies scholars.