Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction (Representations Health Disability Culture and Society LUP)

Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and the body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies shows the mutability of the Victorians’ understanding of the human body’s centrality to identity—an understanding made mutable by changes in science, technology, religion, and class. It also demonstrates how that understanding changed along with developing narrative styles: as disability became increasingly medicalized and the soul increasingly psychologized, the mode of looking at deviant bodies shifted from gaping at spectacle to scrutinizing specimen, and the shape of narratives evolved from lengthy multiple-plot novels to slim case studies. Moreover, the book illustrates that, despite this overall linear movement from spectacle to specimen in literature and culture, individual texts consistently reveal ambivalence about categorizing the body, positioning some bodies as abnormally deviant while also denying the reality or stability of normalcy. Bodies in Victorian fiction never remain stable entities, in spite of narrative drives and the social, medical, or scientific discourses that attempted to control and understand them. An Open Access edition of this book is available on theLiverpool University Press website and through KnowledgeUnlatched. Articulating Bodies investigates thecontemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability'smedicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrativeform and body. The book examines texts from across the century,from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo'sNotre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle's SherlockHolmes story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893), coveringgenres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters.By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structureacross six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres,Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout theVictorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well asnarrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, bothconstructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy fromabnormality. As fiction's form developed from the massive hybridnovels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to thecase-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disabilitybecame increasingly medicalized, moving from the position ofspectacle to specimen An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability's medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction's form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability's medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction's form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-sicle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability's medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction's form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-sie cle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. Contents Acknowledgements Introduction I Grotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris II Social Bodies: Dickens and the Disabled Narrator in Bleak House III Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone IV Sanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins’s Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House V Fairy-Tale Bodies: Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince VI Mysterious Bodies: Solving and De-Solving Disability in the Fin-de-Siècle Mystery Afterword Works Cited Index Articulating Bodies shows how Victorian fiction’s narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality.