Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-262) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: the laboratory of the Gothic imagination -- Reanimated corpses, blood, and the Gothic vital elements -- Anaesthetic skeletons and the pain of melancholy -- Counterfeit corpses and evaded dissection -- The Devil and the disability narrative -- Contagious narratives and Gothic vaccination.
Summary:
"This book demonstrates a little-studied crossover between the Gothic imagination and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. Unafraid to explore the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, Laura R. Kremmel argues, Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama, and chapbooks expanded the possibilities of medical theories by showing what they might look like in a speculative space without limits. In comparing the Gothic's collection of unsavory tropes to morbid anatomy's collection of diseased organs, Kremmel shows that the Gothic's prioritization of fear and gore gives it access to non-normative bodies, shifting medical and narrative agency to bodies considered powerless. Each chapter pairs a familiar gothic trope with a critical medical debate; the result is to give silenced bodies power over their own narratives."--Provided by publisher.
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.