Stanford University Press Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture

Product Description 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. Review 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 From the Back Cover "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 About the Author Athena Vrettos is Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.