Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Download or read book Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel written by Melissa Rampelli and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel looks extensively at hysteria discourse through medical and sociological texts and examines how this body of work intersects with important cultural debates to define women’s social, physical, and mental health. The book sketches out prominent shifts in cultural reactions to the idea of diffused agency and the prized model of the interiorized, individual person capable of self will and governance. Melissa Rampelli takes up the work of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, showing how the authors play with and manipulate stock literary figures to contribute to this dialogue about the causes and cures of women’s hysterical distress.