Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture - Paperback

by Athena Vrettos (Author)

This book focuses on the centrality of illness-particularly psychosomatic illness-as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture. It shows how illness shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public, and how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition.

Back Jacket

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