Victorian Pain

(Paperback)

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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.