Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic

Gothic Literary Studies

by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Throughout his career, Wilkie Collins made changes to the prototypical gothic scenario, reworking and adapting aristocratic villains, victimized maidens, and medieval castles in order to thrill his Victorian readership. Drawing upon contemporary anxieties introduced by advances in neuroscience and the development of criminology, Collins transformed Moorish castles into modern medical institutions and ghost-fearing heroines into nineteenth-century women who feared the surgeon’s knife. This volume uniquely explores the way in which Collin’s gothic revisions increasingly tackled such medical questions, using the terrain of scientific changes to capitalize on his readers’ fears.

Genres: Gothic

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2009

About the author

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse, France, and Associate Researcher at Alexandre Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology in Paris. Her research specializes on the relations between literature and science. She is the author of Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (2009) and Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (2007).