Vital Signs

Rothfield, Lawrence

ISBN 10: 0691029547 / ISBN 13: 9780691029542

Published by Princeton University Press, 1994

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Vital Signs
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691029547
• ISBN 13: 9780691029542
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.

About the Author

Lawrence Rothfield is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.