Profound Science and Elegant Literature

Profound Science and Elegant Literature
Author: Stephanie P. Browner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812201485

In 1847, at the first meeting of the American Medical Association, the newly elected president reminded his brethren that the profession, "once venerated," no longer earned homage "spontaneously and universally." The medical marketplace was crowded and competitive; state laws regulating medical practice had been repealed; and professional practitioners were often branded by their lay competitors as aristocrats bent on establishing a health care monopoly. By 1900, the battles were over, and, as the president of AMA had hoped, doctors were now widely venerated as men of profound science, elegant literature, polite accomplishments, and virtue. In fact, by 1900 the doctor had replaced the minister as the most esteemed professional in the United States; disease loomed larger than damnation; and science promised to manage the discord, differences, and excesses that democracy seemed to license. In Profound Science and Elegant Literature, Stephanie Browner charts this trajectory—and demonstrates at the same time that medicine's claims to somatic expertise and managerial talent did not go uncontested. Even as elite physicians founded institutions that made professional medicine's authority visible and legitimate, many others worried about the violence that might attend medicine's drive to mastery and science's equation of rational disinterest with white, educated masculinity. Reading fiction by a wide range of authors beside and against medical texts, Browner looks to the ways in which writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, James, Chesnutt, and Jewett inventoried the collateral damage that might be done as science installed its peculiar understanding of the body. A work of impressive interdisciplinary reach, Profound Science and Elegant Literature documents both the extraordinary rise of professional medicine in the United States and the aesthetic imperative to make the body meaningful that led many American writers to resist the medicalized body.

A Companion to American Fiction, 1780 - 1865

A Companion to American Fiction, 1780 - 1865
Author: Shirley Samuels
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0470999209

This Companion presents the current state of criticism in the field of American fiction from the earliest declarations of nationhood to secession and civil war. Draws heavily on historical and cultural contexts in its consideration of American fiction Relates the fiction of the period to conflicts about territory and sovereignty and to issues of gender, race, ethnicity and identity Covers different forms of fiction, including children’s literature, sketches, polemical pieces, historical romances, Gothic novels and novels of exploration Considers both canonical and lesser-known authors, including James Fennimore Cooper, Hannah Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe Treats neglected topics, such as the Western novel, science and the novel, and American fiction in languages other than English

The Writing Cure

The Writing Cure
Author: Alexandra Lembert-Heidenreich
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3643904029

Medicine and literary studies are often thematically aligned, since the former can be understood as an interpretive science. Literary texts across all genres and time periods deal with medical issues that portray illness, patients' suffering/recovering, or doctors at work, thus pointing towards a deep-seated interest in the human condition. Enveloping the growing interdisciplinary field of medical humanities, this book examines the connections between medicine and fictional/non-fictional literature, from the Early Modern period to the most recent present from literary, medical, and cultural studies perspectives. (Series: Natural Sciences and Humanities in Dialogue / Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften im Dialog - Vol. 2)

Disaffected

Disaffected
Author: Xine Yao
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2021-09-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478022108

In Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

An Elegant Defense

An Elegant Defense
Author: Matt Richtel
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2019-03-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0062698508

National Bestseller "Gives you all the context you need to understand the science of immunity. ... An Elegant Defense left me with [a] sense of awe.” —Bill Gates, Gates Notes Summer Reading List The Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist "explicates for the lay reader the intricate biology of our immune system" (Jerome Groopman, MD, New York Review of Books) From New York Times science journalist Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense is an acclaimed and definitive exploration of the immune system and the secrets of health. Interweaving cutting-edge science with the intimate stories of four individual patients, this epic, first-of-its-kind book “give[s] lay readers a means of understanding what’s known so far about the intricate biology of our immune systems” (The Week). The immune system is our body’s essential defense network, a guardian vigilantly fighting illness, healing wounds, maintaining order and balance, and keeping us alive. It has been honed by evolution over millennia to face an almost infinite array of threats. For all its astonishing complexity, however, the immune system can be easily compromised by fatigue, stress, toxins, advanced age, and poor nutrition—hallmarks of modern life—and even by excessive hygiene. Paradoxically, it is a fragile wonder weapon that can turn on our own bodies with startling results, leading today to epidemic levels of autoimmune disorders. An Elegant Defense effortlessly guides readers on a scientific detective tale winding from the Black Plague to twentieth-century breakthroughs in vaccination and antibiotics, to today’s laboratories that are revolutionizing immunology—perhaps the most extraordinary and consequential medical story of our time. Drawing on extensive new interviews with dozens of world-renowned scientists, Richtel has produced a landmark book, equally an investigation into the deepest riddles of survival and a profoundly human tale that is movingly brought to life through the eyes of his four main characters, each of whom illuminates an essential facet of our “elegant defense.”

Rural Fictions, Urban Realities

Rural Fictions, Urban Realities
Author: Mark Storey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2015-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190272422

This study of late 19th-century American literature uses the period's rural fiction to reveal the increasingly intricate and sometimes problematic connections between urban and rural life.

A New Companion to Herman Melville

A New Companion to Herman Melville
Author: Wyn Kelley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 596
Release: 2022-08-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1119668506

Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ways in which Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated. In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hem­ispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers: A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville In-depth examinations of Melville's treatment of the natural world Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Anti-Jacobin Novels, Part I, Volume 4

Anti-Jacobin Novels, Part I, Volume 4
Author: W M Verhoeven
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351223208

A selection of Anti-Jacobin novels reprinted in full with annotations. The set includes works by male and female writers holding a range of political positions within the Anti-Jacobin camp, and represents the French Revolution, American Revolution, Irish Rebellion and political unrest in Scotland.

Health and Wellness in 19th-Century America

Health and Wellness in 19th-Century America
Author: John C. Waller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2014-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0313380457

This book provides a comprehensive description of what being sick and receiving "medical care" was like in 19th-century America, allowing modern readers to truly appreciate the scale of the improvements in healthcare theory and practice. Health and Wellness in 19th-Century America covers a period of dramatic change in the United States by examining our changing understanding of the nature of the disease burden, the increasing size of the nation, and our conceptions of sickness and health. With topics ranging from the unsanitary tenements of New York's Five Points, the field hospitals of the Civil War, and to the laboratories of Johns Hopkins Medical School, author John C. Waller reveals a complex picture of tradition, discovery, innovation, and occasional spectacular success. This book draws upon an extensive literature to document sickness and wellness in environments like rural homesteads, urban East-coast slums, and the hastily built cities of the West. It provides a fascinating historical examination of a century in which Americans made giant strides in understanding disease yet also clung to traditional methods and ideas, charting how U.S. medical science gradually transformed from being a backwater to a world leader in the field.

Howling for Justice

Howling for Justice
Author: Rebecca Tillett
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-11-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0816513384

"This book is a collection of essays by international scholars celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Silko's novel, Almanac of the Dead, and addressing those ongoing demands for justice. It offers new responses to Almanac's sociocultural, historical, and political contexts, and includes a new interview with Silko in which she reflects on the twenty years since the novel's publication"--