ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Erika Wright is an assistant professor of clinical medical education at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, associate director of USC’s HEAL (Humanities, Ethics, Art, and the Law) and Narrative Medicine master’s programs, and a lecturer in USC’s University Park Campus English department.

REVIEWS

“In Erika Wright’s concise, incisive Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, she reverses a formative assumption: instead of reading for illness, she focuses on well-being. She recovers narratives of prevention instead of therapeutic narratives, and those health-based stories have a different form; instead of a pattern of diagnosis/crisis/cure, narratives of health are stories of steady-state maintenance.”—Victorian Studies

“Offering a largely overlooked perspective, Wright adds to growing body of scholarship in the medical humanities by considering what she terms ‘hygienic’ Victorian novels. She argues that in contrast to the familiar therapeutic narrative arc of ‘prelude, crisis, and cure,’ hygienic narratives are premised on maintenance and prevention. …Wright’s volume not only represents an important contribution to scholarship on the Victorian novel, medical humanities, and narrative theory but also demonstrates the value of literature in helping improve medical education and communication. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”—CHOICE

“A fascinating and timely contribution to discussions concerning the interrelation of medicine and fiction.”—Heather Tilley, English Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Becoming Patient Readers

Part One: Domestication

One: Jane Austen’s Plots of Prevention

Two: Health, Identity, and Narrative Authority in Jane Eyre

Part Two: Isolation

Three: Quarantine, Social Theory, and Little Dorrit

Four: The Omniscience of Invalidism

Part Three: Professionalization

Five: Narrative Competence and the Family Doctor in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters

Afterword: Health in Narrative Medicine

Notes

Bibliography

Index