Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.

Autorentext

Katherine Byrne is Lecturer in English at the University of Ulster.

Zusammenfassung
This study examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, analyzing consumptive characters for insights into how society viewed this 'dread disease' and its sufferers, and revealing the myths which surrounded this socially significant illness. It displays, also, how popular assumptions were used as diagnostic tools by a frustrated medical profession.

Inhalt

Introduction; 1. Nineteenth-century medical discourse on pulmonary phthisis; 2. Consuming the family economy: disease and capitalism in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South; 3. The consumptive diathesis and the Victorian invalid in Mrs Humphry Ward's Eleanor; 4. 'There is beauty in woman's decay': the rise of the tubercular aesthetic; 5. Consumption and the Count: the pathological origins of Vampirism and Bram Stoker's Dracula; 6. 'A kind of intellectual advantage': phthisis and masculine identity in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady; Conclusion; Appendix A. Phthisis mortality; Appendix B. Medical publications on consumption; Appendix C. Gender distribution of phthisis.