Romantic Autopsy by Arden Hegele


ISBN
9780192848345
Published
Binding
Hardcover
Pages
240
Dimensions
161 x 240 x 18mm

Today, we do not expect a symptomatic reading to refer to bodily symptoms, or a literary dissection to be more than metaphorical. But this was not always true. In Romantic Autopsy, Arden Hegele considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find that the two fields collaborated to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible
texts. Together, Romantic readers and doctors elaborated protocols of diagnosis-practices for interpretation that could be used to diagnose disease, and to understand fiction and
poetry.This volume puts essential works of British Romantic literature that seem at first to have little to do with medicine, such as the lyrics of William Wordsworth, the elegies of Percy Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, back into conversation with emergent medical disciplines of the period -- anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology. Poems and novels, Hegele argues, were historically understood
through techniques designed for the analysis of disease; meanwhile, autopsy reports and case histories adopted stylistic features associated with literature. Countering the assumption of a growing
specialization in Romanticism, these practices suggest that symptomatic reading (treating a text's superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still used and debated today, might have originated from Romantic diagnostics. The first study of the interconnected literary and medical analytics of British Romanticism, Romantic Autopsy charts an important history underlying our own approaches to literary analysis.
EOFY 2025 Book Frenzy
113.04
RRP: $132.99
15% off RRP


This product is unable to be ordered online. Please check in-store availability.
Instore Price: $132.99
Enter your Postcode or Suburb to view availability and delivery times.

You might also like


RRP refers to the Recommended Retail Price as set out by the original publisher at time of release.
The RRP set by overseas publishers may vary to those set by local publishers due to exchange rates and shipping costs.
Due to our competitive pricing, we may have not sold all products at their original RRP.