Author |
Byrne, Katherine |
Year |
2011 |
Publisher |
Cambridge: CUP |
Number of pages |
242 |
ISBN |
9780521766678 |
Keywords |
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Abstract
Amazon (2013):
Tuberculosis was a widespread and deadly disease which devastated the British population
in the nineteenth century: consequently it also had a huge impact upon public consciousness.
This 2010 text explores the representations of tuberculosis in nineteenth-century
literature and culture. Fears about gender roles, degeneration, national efficiency
and sexual transgression all play their part in the portrayal of 'consumption', a
disease which encompassed a variety of cultural associations. Through an examination
of a range of Victorian texts, from well-known and popular novels by Charles Dickens
and Elizabeth Gaskell to critically neglected works by Mrs Humphry Ward and Charles
Reade, this work reveals the metaphors of illness which surrounded tuberculosis and
the ways those metaphors were used in the fiction of the day. The book also contains
detailed analysis of the substantial body of writing by nineteenth-century physicians
which exists about this disease, and examines the complex relationship between medical
'fact' and literary fiction.