Reading the Brontė Body: Disease, Desire and the Constraints of Culture - Hardcover

Torgerson, Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403967962 ISBN 13: 9781403967961

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Synopsis

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontė's literary representations of illness and disease reflect the major role illness played in the lives of the Victorians and its frequent reoccurrence within the Brontės' personal lives. An in-depth analysis of the history of nineteenth-century medicine provides the necessary cultural context to understand these representations, giving modern readers a sense of how health, illness, and the body were understood in Victorian England. Together, medical anthropology and the history of medicine offer a useful lens with which to understand Victorian texts. Reading the Brontė Body is the first scholarly attempt to provide both the theoretical framework and historical background to make such a literary analysis of the Brontė novels possible, while exploring how these representations of disease and illness work within a larger cultural framework.

About this title

About the Author:

BETH TORGERSON is currently an Assistant Professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine, USA. The recipient of the Bechtol Lee Doctoral Fellowship, she attended King's College London, UK for a year as an affiliated research student, where she participated in their Victorian Studies graduate program. Her scholarly work has appeared in Victorian Review and Disabilities Studies Quarterly. Also a poet, her poetry has appeared in The Texas Review, Plains Song Review, as well as in several anthologies.

Review:

"A cogently argued book....provides a unique perspective on the structure and content of the novels, and also represents a valuable historical background for any Brontė reader." - Brontė Studies "This is an important and very useful approach to the always compelling Bronte sisters, one that takes the reader back to a most important element of their lives and the lives of their fictional characters, the gendered body and its individual and cultural ills." - Gail Turley Houston, The University of New Mexico

"Beth Torgerson has done an admirable job of showing, as her subtitle indicates, the constraints of culture that inflected and arguably fuelled the Bronte sisters representations of illness." - Victorian Review

" . . .a clearly written, well organized book" - VIJ Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1403967962
• ISBN 13: 9781403967961
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 196