Introduction : hysteria and the plot of pathology -- The sentimental heroine and hysteria in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility -- The woman detective and hysteria in Charles Dickens's Bleak House -- The married woman and hysteria in George Eliot's Middlemarch -- The new woman and hysteria in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders -- Epilogue : continued preoccupations--the shell-shocked war veteran and hysteria in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
Summary:
"Narratives of Women's Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel looks extensively at hysteria discourse through medical and sociological texts and examines how this body of work intersects with important cultural debates to define women's social, physical, and mental health. The book sketches out prominent shifts in cultural reactions to the idea of diffused agency and the prized model of the interiorized, individual person capable of self will and governance. Melissa Rampelli takes up the work of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, showing how the authors play with and manipulate stock literary figures to contribute to this dialogue about the causes and cures of women's hysterical distress." -- Provided by publisher.
Series:
Palgrave studies in literature, science and medicine
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.