This study of sensibility in the eighteenth-century English novel discusses literary representations of suffering and responses to it in the social and scientific context of the period. The reader of novels shares with more scientific observers the activity of gazing on suffering, leading Ann Van Sant to explore the coincidence between the rhetoric of pathos and scientific presentation as they were applied to repentant prostitutes and children of the vagrant and criminal poor. The book goes on to explore the novel's location of psychological responses to suffering in physical forms. Van Sant invokes eighteenth-century debates about the relative status of sight and touch in epistemology and psychology, as a context for discussing the 'man of feeling' (notably in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey) - a spectator who registers his sensibility by physical means.
This study of sensibility in the eighteenth-century English novel discusses literary representations of suffering and responses to it in the social and scientific context of the period. The reader of novels shares with more scientific observers the activity of gazing on suffering, leading Ann Van Sant to explore the coincidence between the rhetoric of pathos and scientific presentation as they were applied to repentant prostitutes and children of the vagrant and criminal poor. The book goes on to explore the novel's location of psychological responses to suffering in physical forms. Van Sant invokes eighteenth-century debates about the relative status of sight and touch in epistemology and psychology, as a context for discussing the 'man of feeling' (notably in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey) - a spectator who registers his sensibility by physical means.
England may with justice claim to be the native land of transfusion," wrote one European physician in 1877, acknowledging Great Britain’s crucial role in developing and promoting human-to-human transfusion as treatment for life-threatening blood loss. As news of this revolutionary medical technique spread from professional publications to popular journals and newspapers, the operation invaded the Victorian imagination. Transfusion is the first extended study of this intersection between medical and literary history. It examines the medical discourse that surrounded the real nineteenth-century practice of transfusion, which focused on women suffering from uterine hemorrhage, alongside literary works that exploited the operation’s sentimental, satirical, sensational, and gothic potentials. In the eighteenth century, the term "transfusion" was used to figure aesthetic and religious inspiration as well as erotic and romantic commingling—associations that persisted into the nineteenth century and informed attitudes toward the medical practice of blood transfer and the cultural conception of sympathetic exchange. Exploring transfusion’s role in canonical works such as Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and Stoker’s Dracula, as well as a surprising array of lesser-known short stories and novels, Kibbie demonstrates the tangled, mutually informing relationship between science and culture. This innovative study traces the creation of a new fluid economy between persons, one that could be seen to forge new forms of intimacy between donors and recipients or to threaten the very idea of personal identity.
Eighteenth-century sensibilite has always been controversial. In fact, the term itself refers to complex forms of physical and emotional responsiveness, and Lewis's study investigates the fictional exploration of various key problems of sentimental response that were at the heart of eighteenth-century moral, epistemological and aesthetic debates. These are analysed in conjunction with some of the actual (often emotional) responses that the term, its fictions and images have provoked through time, including an indispensable survey of the varying construction of sensibilite as an object of study, and the polemics subtending its definition. The verbal evocation of the visual in the form of 'spectacles' and 'signs' was understood in the eighteenth century as having an especially powerful impact. Lewis provides a new reading of the theme of sensibility by analysing the 'textual images' in three best-selling novels from the mid-century: Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne, Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne and Rousseau's Julie. The examination of a largely neglected corpus of illustrations, understood as readings of each text, provides striking new evidence of the complexity, thematic richness and duplicity of these spectacles, whose power to provoke different reactions is perhaps their most interesting characteristic.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.