Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

by Katherine Byrne

• ISBN13: 9780521766678
• ISBN10: 0521766672
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-01-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Tuberculosis was a widespread and deadly disease which devastated the British population in the nineteenth century: consequently it also had a huge impact upon public consciousness. This 2010 text explores the representations of tuberculosis in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Fears about gender roles, degeneration, national efficiency and sexual transgression all play their part in the portrayal of 'consumption', a disease which encompassed a variety of cultural associations. Through an examination of a range of Victorian texts, from well-known and popular novels by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell to critically neglected works by Mrs Humphry Ward and Charles Reade, this work reveals the metaphors of illness which surrounded tuberculosis and the ways those metaphors were used in the fiction of the day. The book also contains detailed analysis of the substantial body of writing by nineteenth-century physicians which exists about this disease, and examines the complex relationship between medical 'fact' and literary fiction.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Nineteenth-century medical discourse on tuberculosis	p. 12
Consuming the family economy: disease and capitalism in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South	p. 45
The consumptive diathesis and the Victorian invalid in Mrs Humphry Ward's Eleanor	p. 69
'There is beauty in woman's decay': the rise of the tubercular aesthetic	p. 92
Consumption and the Count: the pathological origins of vampirism and Bram Stoker's Dracula	p. 124
'A kind of intellectual advantage': consumption and masculine identity in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady	p. 150
Conclusion	p. 171
Epilogue 'A truly modern illness': into the twentieth century and beyond	p. 176
Phthisis mortality	p. 189
Medical publications on consumption	p. 190
Gender distribution of phthisis	p. 191
Notes	p. 192
Bibliography	p. 212
Index	p. 222
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