Bedside Seductions
Subtitle: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830-1880
Edition: 1st ed edition
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: December 15, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 225
ISBN-13: 9780312177058
Subjects: 19th Century English Literature; Women In English Literature; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Health/Fitness; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism & Collections / General; 19th century; English fiction; Great Britain; History; History and criticism; Literature and medicine; Nurses in literature
First sentence: IN HIS VITRIOLIC ESSAY OF 1880, Fiction-Fair and Foul, John Ruskin meditates on the surfeit of death and illness in the Victorian novel, claiming that detailed, clinical depictions of morbidity are the hallmarks of the genre: "[the modern reader can] gather into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying itself with aberration of the mind..." (166).