LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

The importance of authorial intention has been debated extensively in literary studies. In cognitive literary studies, however, the effects books provoke in readers are of greater relevance. With an unreliable intradiegetic narrator, ambivalent about her denial of hunger, Wintergirls (2009), a US YA anorexia novel, embodies the spiraling network of lies that feeds this condition. This essay takes Wintergirls as a starting point to discuss the therapeutic or harmful effects of literature, over and above the intentions of the writer. Adopting a cognitive literary perspective, this essay proposes the concept of an "unreliable reader," and uses that concept to demonstrate that the novel has a self-triggering potential to reinforce anorexia. This is an unusual approach, inasmuch as it runs counter to previous positive literary criticism of Wintergirls, but it is a perspective in urgent need of reconsideration for the sake of disordered readers.

This article puts translation on the center stage of second-wave medical humanities. It argues that translation is a way to describe medical discourse in its complexities, from the patient-doctor exchange to the patients' account of their illness, and from instances of medical (mis)communication to the lack thereof (untranslatability). After introducing the notion of therapeutic translation in the light of Julia Kristeva's theory of depression, it puts forward three models of therapeutic translation: outer translation, inner translation, and self-translation. This newly forged method is applied to a series of exemplary cases drawn from the repertoire of contemporary Italian women's poetry.

Using the multiple versions of Doctor Faustus's fraudulent leg removal presented in texts A and B of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy, along with The English Faust Book (a source text for Marlowe), and examining an extensive number of early modern surgical manuals, this essay discusses leg amputation in the early modern period. As well as attempting to understand the circumstances that would cause a surgeon to proceed with such an extreme course of action, the essay also explores the operation itself, its evolution through the early modern period, the instruments used, the life prospects of an amputee in terms of mobility and prosthetics, and finally the social implications and moral responsibilities of removing a limb in the context of a society that placed great importance in the idea of corporeal integrity in the afterlife.

What are the formal potentialities of illness narratives across media and writerly modes? And how can a formalist reading within this genre contribute to an understanding of particularly stigmatized illnesses and conditions? This essay considers Julia Lederer's and Carolyn Lazard's semi-autobiographical works on anorexia nervosa and chronic illness, respectively, and approaches them through the lens of Caroline Levine's new formalist method, which fuses the literary (or artistic more broadly) with the social and political. It concludes that Lederer's and Lazard's imagination and creation of other, alternative worlds-worlds of illness and disability-provide critical insights into the meanings of illness, health, and well-being, and their political implications. In so doing, they also probe at and question the role of medicine in discursive constructions of illness and disability.

This essay examines how cultural anxieties about the impact of novels on mental and physical health sparked by the sensation novel permeated late Victorian medical discourse, focusing on the prominent physician and novelist, John Milner Fothergill (1841-1888). I argue, firstly, that the articulation of these anxieties in medical writing was shaped by contemporary attitudes towards women and the working class, and secondly, that, despite his explicit censures, Fothergill's medical and literary works evince narrative and stylistic affinities with sensation fiction. The essay delineates the context behind physicians' opposition to the consumption of certain kinds of fiction in the period, demonstrating how the cultural impact of the sensation novel phenomenon can be more fully charted by incorporating explicitly medical responses. I conclude by emphasizing the need for medical humanists to attend to the diverse ways that contemporary literary developments shape medical prose, whether in the spirit of repudiation or appropriation.