Title: Somatic fictions
First published: 1995
Description: Somatic Fictions focuses on the centrality of illness - particularly psychosomatic illness - as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture, emphasizing 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 explores the historical assumptions, patterns of perceptions, and structures of belief that invested sickness and health with cultural meaning.

The book treats narrative as a crucial component of cultural history and demonstrates how literary, medical, and cultural narratives charted the categories through which people came to understand themselves and the structures of social interaction. Vrettos challenges those feminist and cultural historians who have maintained that nineteenth-century medical attempts to chart the meaning of bodily structures resulted in essential categories of social and sexual definition.

She argues that the power of illness to make one's own body seem alien, or to link disparate groups of people through the process of contagion, suggested to Victorians the potential instability of social and biological identities.

The book shows how Victorians attempted to manage diffuse and chaotic social issues by displacing them onto matters of physiology. This displacement resulted in the collapse of perceived boundaries of human embodiment, whether through fears of psychic and somatic permeability, sympathetic identification with another's pain, or conflicting measures of racial and cultural fitness.

In the course of her study, the author examines the relationships among health, imperialism, anthropometry, and racial theory in such popular Victorian novels as Dracula and She, and the conceptual linkage of spirituality, hysteria, and nervousness in Victorian literature and medicine.
Subjects: History and criticism, Imagination in literature, Somatoform disorders in literature, Diseases in literature, Literature and mental illness, English fiction, Mind and body in literature, American fiction, Medicine, Psychosomatic, in literature, Medical fiction, Health in literature, Literature and medicine, Sick in literature, History, English fiction, history and criticism, 19th century, American fiction, history and criticism, 19th century, Medicine in literature, Criticism and interpretation, Psychosomatic Medicine, Somatoform disorders, Modern Literature, History, 19th Century, Roman anglais, Histoire et critique, Médecine psychosomatique dans la littérature, Roman américain, Littérature et maladies mentales, Histoire, Symptômes somatiques dans la littérature, Esprit et corps dans la littérature, Imagination dans la littérature, Maladies dans la littérature, Santé dans la littérature, Malades dans la littérature, 18.05 English literature, Krankheit, Leib-Seele-Problem, Literatur, Psychisch Kranker, Ziekten, Engels, Victoriaanse tijd, Fictie, Littérature anglaise, Thèmes, motifs, Maladies psychosomatiques, Dans la littérature, Esprit et corps, Imagination, Roman
Places: English-speaking countries
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PR878.M42 V73 1995