Vital Signs

by Lawrence Rothfield

Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.

252 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 1992

Reviews

[saizine · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read though at times dense and, at others, repetitive. I particularly enjoyed the chapter entitled, "From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism", as well as the fact that the chapters build on each other (i.e. Flaubert discussed Flaubert, Balzac discussed Balzac and Flaubert, and Middlemarch discussed Flaubert, Balzac, and Middlemarch, etc). Certainly an intriguing read, but not the most enthralling academic work I've come across in my research, though this may very well be because I am a historian with an interest in literature rather than a literary theorist/historicist.