Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780754654919)

Arguing that vision was the dominant mode for understanding suffering in the Romantic era, Elizabeth A. Dolan shows that Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley experimented with aesthetic and scientific visual methods in order to expose the social structures underlying suffering. Dolan's exploration of illness, healing, and social justice in the writings of these three authors depends on two major questions: How do women writers' innovations in literary form make visible previously unseen suffering? And, how do women authors portray embodied vision to claim literary authority? Dolan's research encompasses a wide range of primary sources in science and medicine, including nosology, health travel, botany, and ophthalmology, allowing her to map the resonances and disjunctions between medical theory and literature. This in turn points towards a revisioning of enduring themes in Romanticism such as the figure of the Romantic poet, the relationship between the mind and nature, sensibility and sympathy, solitude and sociability, landscape aesthetics, the reform novel, and Romantic-era science. Dolan's book is distinguished by its deep engagement with several disciplines and genres, making it a key text for understanding Romanticism, the history of medicine, and the position of the woman writer during the period.

Author: Elizabeth A. Dolan
ISBN-10: 0754654915
ISBN-13: 9780754654919
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 08/29/2008
Pages: 260
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 01/23/2009 pg. 19
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2009 pg. 292
Choice 02/01/2009