Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction

by Jill L. Matus

• ISBN13: 9780521760249
• ISBN10: 0521760240
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-12
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Jill Matus explores shock in Victorian fiction and psychology with startling results that reconfigure the history of trauma theory. Central to Victorian thinking about consciousness and emotion, shock is a concept that challenged earlier ideas about the relationship between mind and body. Although the new materialist psychology of the mid-nineteenth century made possible the very concept of a wound to the psyche - the recognition, for example, that those who escaped physically unscathed from train crashes or other overwhelming experiences might still have been injured in some significant way - it was Victorian fiction, with its complex explorations of the inner life of the individual and accounts of upheavals in personal identity, that most fully articulated the idea of the haunted, possessed, and traumatised subject. This wide-ranging book reshapes our understanding of Victorian theories of mind and memory and reveals the relevance of nineteenth-century culture to contemporary theories of trauma.

Author Biography

Jill L. Matus is Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction: the psyche in pain	p. 1
Historicizing trauma	p. 20
Dream and trance: Gaskell's North and South as a "condition-of-consciousness" novel	p. 61
Memory and aftermath: from Dickens's "The Signalman" to The Mystery of Edwin Drood	p. 83
Overwhelming emotion and psychic shock in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil and Daniel Deronda	p. 121
Dissociation and multiple selves: memory, Myers and Stevenson's "shilling shocker"	p. 160
Afterword on afterwards	p. 183
Notes	p. 192
Selected bibliography	p. 226
Index	p. 236
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