New in paperback!
Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medicine and the Novel
(Ohio State University Press, 2010; paperback fall 2016)
The full book is downloadable from OSUP’s website here.
In Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel (2010), I argue that the archives of medical writing, in casebooks, treatises, and periodicals, offer a rich critical resource for illuminating the complex history of the novel and the developing professional methodologies of both doctors and novelists. Revising the Clinic shows how Victorian physicians and novelists share textual strategies despite different disciplinary contexts and pressures: physicians repurpose romantic discourses from nineteenth-century fiction, and novelists make contrarian use of clinical discourse as a sentimentalizing tool. Attention to these tensions productively complicates our view of the power relations written by and through “the clinic” and engenders a more versatile understanding of genre, as strategic, momentary, and conditioned by historical and aesthetic contingencies.
Introduction:
Vision, representation, and the production of knowledge
Chapter 1:
Curious observations, curious sights: the eighteenth-century case history
Chapter 2:
Staging clinical realism in the Victorian periodical
Chapter 3:
The sentimental eye in Dickens and Gaskell
Chapter 4:
George Eliot’s realist vision: Mechanical observation and the production of sympathy
Chapter 5:
Speculation and insight: Experimental medicine and the expansion of realism
Chapter 6:
Mapping an unnavigable river: Freud, Rider Haggard, and the imperial romance
Here’s this book’s original prospectus, with chapter breakdown
Download a PDF of the Introduction and Conclusion here (includes endnotes, works cited, and index)
meegankennedy 
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