Victorian pain

Resource Information

The work Victorian pain represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Victorian pain

Statement of responsibility

Rachel Ablow

Creator

• Ablow, Rachel

Author

• Ablow, Rachel

Subject

• England
• Englisch
• English literature
• English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• Great Britain
• HISTORY -- General
• History
• Human body in literature
• Human body in literature
• Kultur
• LITERARY CRITICISM -- General
• Literatur
• Literature and science
• Literature and science -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• 1800-1899
• Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Medizin
• PHILOSOPHY -- History & Surveys | General
• PHILOSOPHY -- Political
• PHILOSOPHY -- Social
• Pain
• Pain -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Pain in literature
• Pain in literature
• Schmerz
• Wissenschaft
• Literature and society
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Genre

• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, Victorian Pain offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. Rachel Ablow provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. She explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, Victorian Pain shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons--and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read."--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

820.9/353

Index

index present

LC call number

PR468.P15

LC item number

A26 2017

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography