Narratives of Women¿s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

2024
ISBN: 978-3-031-39895-7
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buch, Englisch, 214 Seiten, HC runder Rücken kaschiert, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 413 g

Reihe: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

looks extensively at hysteria discourse through medical and sociological texts and examines how this body of work intersects with important cultural debates to define women’s social, physical, and mental health. The book sketches out prominent shifts in cultural reactions to the idea of diffused agency and the prized model of the interiorized, individual person capable of self will and governance. Melissa Rampelli takes up the work of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, showing how the authors play with and manipulate stock literary figures to contribute to this dialogue about the causes and cures of women’s hysterical distress.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rampelli, Melissa

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction.- 1. The Problem of the Self-Governed Subject in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.- 2. Embodied Knowing and the Hysteric in Dickens’s Bleak House.- 3. George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the Question of Marriage as Catalyst or Cure.- 4. Hysterical Degeneration and The New Woman in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders.- Epilogue.

Über Autor(innen)

Melissa Rampelli is Associate Professor of English at Holy Family University, USA.