Victorian Pain

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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 wr

Reviews

"Victorian Pain is a clear-eyed, beautifully written investigation of the role and uses of pain in the work of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Bront, Charles Darwin and Thomas Hardy. . . . No one who is fortunate enough to read this book will look at the works it discusses in the same way again." * Times Literary Supplement *
"Ablow explores the idea of pain in Victorian thought and literature, navigating between understanding pain as private, incommunicable, and pre-social (theorized most prominently in Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, CH, Jan'86) and theories of pain as mediated by language and produced through social life." * Choice *

Author Bio

Rachel Ablow is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot and the editor of The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature.