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Reading the Brontë Body

Disease, Desire and the Constraints of Culture

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  • © 2005

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Authors:
  1. Beth Torgerson
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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
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  2. Introduction

    • Beth Torgerson
    Pages 1-17

  3. “Sick Of Mankind and Their Disgusting Ways”: Victorian Alcoholism, Social Reform, and Anne Brontë’s Narratives of Illness

    • Beth Torgerson
    Pages 19-37

  4. Ailing Women in the Age of Cholera: Illness in Shirley

    • Beth Torgerson
    Pages 39-57

  5. Hysteria, Female Desire, and Self-Control in Villette

    • Beth Torgerson
    Pages 59-88

  6. Vampires, Ghosts, and the Disease of Dis/Possession in Wuthering Heights

    • Beth Torgerson
    Pages 89-127

  7. Conclusion

    • Beth Torgerson
    Pages 129-137

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 139-180
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Keywords

About this book

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë'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 Brontës' 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 Brontë Body is the first scholarly attempt to provide both the theoretical framework and historical background to make such a literary analysis of the Brontë novels possible, while exploring how these representations of disease and illness work within a larger cultural framework.

Reviews

"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 Brontë reader." - Brontë 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 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.

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