This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the “limit cases” regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries of knowledge. These cases cast troubling and distorted shadows on the culture, throwing into relief the values, vested interests, and power relations regarding the construction of embodied life and consciousness that underpinned the understanding of what it was to be alive in the long nineteenth century. Ranging over a period from the mid-eighteenth century through to the first decade of the twentieth century―an era that has been called the ‘Age of Science’―the essays collected here consider the cultural ripple effects of those previously unimaginable revolutions in science and medicine on humanity’s understanding of being.
Author(s): Lucy Cogan, Michelle O'Connell
Series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 282
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Testing the Boundaries of Being in the Long Nineteenth Century
Works Cited
Part I: The Limits of Life
Chapter 2: Drunkenness, Compulsion, and the Disintegration of the Self: Erasmus Darwin’s Theory of Ebrietas in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth
The Dangers of Vinous Potation
Alcohol in Ascendancy Ireland
The Monstrous Female Drunkard
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Intersex Boundaries: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hermaphroditic Bodies
Eighteenth-Century Hermaphroditism
Sexologists, Case Studies, and Hermaphroditisms
Works Cited
Chapter 4: The Catheter Life: a Social History of Ageing, Risk, and Surgical Innovation in Britain’s Long Nineteenth Century
A Palliative, a Problem, or Perfection? Defining the “Catheter Life,” 1805-1910
Treating the Catheter Life on Harley Street, 1895-1921
Conquering the Catheter Life: Some Reflections on the Meaning of Old Age in British Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Works Cited
Part II: Death’s Embrace
Chapter 5: He Does Not Suffer Now: Death and Citizenship in the National Tale
Necro Citizenship: Bodies, History, and Death in the Community of the National Tale
The Last Violent Feeling of Mortal Emotion: Bare Life and the Death of Disruptive History in The Wild Irish Girl
Consoled by Society’s Approval: Death and Social Approval in Corinne
He’s the Same as Dead: Semi-Death and Citizenship in Ennui
Belonging or Mere Existence: A Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 6: “Thy paleness makes me glad”: Death, Sympathy, and the Body in Keats’s Isabella
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Poe In Extremis
Works Cited
Part III: The Veil of Consciousness
Chapter 8: “[T]o Feel Powers at Work in the Common Air Unfelt by Others”: Receptivity and the Vanishing Body in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
The Vanishing Body
Nervous Connections: Sensibility and Sympathy between Refinement and Pathology
Consumption, Sympathy, and Sacrifice
“Half in Love with Easeful Death.” John Keats as a Vanishing Body
George Eliot, Expanded Sympathy, and the Pathology of the Vanishing Body
Walter Pater’s “Diaphanous” Bodies and the Artist as Medium
Conclusion: Vanishing into “the Herzian Wave of Tuberculosis”
Works Cited
Chapter 9: Grasping Spiritualists and Besotted Scientists: The Female Medium’s Body as Battleground
The Medium and the Message
Vampire Women
Taking Control
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 10: Consequential Madness: Gender and Power in Romantic-Period Madhouse Literature
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Wandering Attention: Victorian Daydreaming, Disembodiment, and the Boundaries of Consciousness
Works Cited
Index
