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  3. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction
  • Cited by 63
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2009
Print publication year:
1994
Online ISBN:
9780511553592
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553592
Subjects:
Literature, History of Science, English Literature 1830-1900, General Science
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (1)
Information

Book description

In this exploration of the significance of illness in the Victorian literary imagination Miriam Bailin maps the cultural implications and narrative effects of the sickroom as an important symbolic space in nineteenth-century life and literature. Dr Bailin draws on non-fictional accounts of illness by Julia Stephen, Harriet Martineau and others to illuminate the presentation of illness and ministration, patient and nurse, in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. She argues that the sickroom functions as an imagined retreat from conflicts in Victorian society, and that fictional representations of illness serve to resolve both social conflict and aesthetic tension. Her concentration on the sickroom scene as a compositional response to insistent formal as well as social problems yields fresh readings of canonical works and approaches to the constituent elements of Victorian realist narrative.

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