Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850)

Reznicek, Matthew L.

Liverpool University Press（2026/02発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 256 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781805966807

Full Description

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

Tales of Health is about the way the Romantic National Tale exercises power and defines the boundaries of citizenship through the categories of health, illness, and disability. When we see these categories at work in these novels, we understand how socio-political belonging is premised on the conception of the healthy body, to the exclusion of bodies deemed otherwise. Employing the Medical Humanities and, especially, the Social Determinants of Health, this book shows that the National Tale achieves its consolidation of the nation through its enforcement of a rigorous politics of health that polices its characters' and citizens' bodies. Focusing on novels from Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Germaine de Staël, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen allows this argument to show that the imbricated concerns of health and citizenship extend well beyond the immediate anxiety roused by the implementation of the 1800 Act of Union. This book argues that, by prioritising the categories of health, illness, and disability, we better understand how power and citizenship function in this widely influential early nineteenth-century genre of Romantic fiction and, thus, how we continue to envision citizenship as an extension of bodily characteristics.

Contents

National Bodies, National Health, and National Tales - An Introduction

1. With Dignity - Yet with Difficulty: Prosthesis, Dependency, and Bodily Norms in The Wild Irish Girl

2. Contaminated by the Epidemic Infection: Disease, Social Disorder, and the Nation in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui

3. Attacking the Most Sensitive Places: The Heart, Circulation, and Belonging in Corinne

4. Excluded by the Very Fiat of Nature: The Processes of Exclusion in the Waverley Novels

5. A Little Lame: Disability, Marriage, and the Re-Imagining of the National Body in Persuasion

The Very Breath of Life: Respiration and the Politics of Health in the Condition of England Novel - A Conclusion