Sally Shuttleworth

Jennifer Wallis

Amelia Bonea

Melissa Dickson

Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or "diseases of modernity" resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various "neurotic remedies," in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions. Anxious Timesexamines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.

Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Anxious Times

Thomas Hardy

Patricia Ingham

Two on a Tower

Emilie Taylor-Brown

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This collaborative volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. With case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China and the South Pacific, it demonstrates how popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were reframed by the social, cultural and political structures of ‘modern life’. Essays within the collection examine ways in which cancer, suicide, and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of ‘new’ ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional, and intellectual changes that contributed to modern medical practice. The volume traces ways that physiological and psychological problems were being constituted in relation to each other, and to their social contexts, and offers new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.

Medicine and culture in the nineteenth century

Progress and pathology

Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions. Anxious Timesexamines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.

In the 1840s novelists such as Brontë and Dickens began to explore the inner world of the child. Simultaneously the first psychiatric studies of childhood were appearing. Moving between literature and science, this book explores issues such as childhood fears, imaginary lands, sexuality, and the relation of the child to animal life

Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900

The Mind of the Child

Professor in the Department of English Literature Sally Shuttleworth

Matthew Campbell

Jaqueline M. Labbe

Ranging historically from the French Revolution to the beginnings of Modernism, this book examines the significance of memory in an era of furious social change. Through an examination of literature, history and science the authors explore the theme of memory as a tool of social progression. This book offers a fresh theoretical understanding of the period and a wealth of empirical material of use to the historian, literature student or social psychologist.

Literary and Cultural Perspectives

Memory and Memorials, 1789-1914

Geoffrey Cantor

Essays examining the ways in which the Victorian periodical press presented the scientific developments of the time to general and specialized audiences. Nineteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of periodical literature, with the publication of over 100,000 different magazines and newspapers for a growing market of eager readers. The Victorian periodical press became an important medium for the dissemination of scientific ideas. Every major scientific advance in the nineteenth century was trumpeted and analyzed in periodicals ranging from intellectual quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review to popular weeklies like the Mirror of Literature, from religious periodicals such as the Evangelical Magazine to the atheistic Oracle of Reason. Scientific articles appeared side by side with the latest fiction or political reporting, while articles on nonscientific topics and serialized novels invoked scientific theories or used analogies drawn from science.The essays collected in Science Serialized examine the variety of ways in which the nineteenth-century periodical press represented science to both general and specialized readerships. They explore the role of scientific controversy in the press and the cultural politics of publication. Subject range from the presentation of botany in women's magazines to the highly public dispute between Darwin and Samuel Butler, and from discussions of the mind-body problem to those of energy physics. Contributors include leading scholars in the fields of history of science and literature: Ann B. Shteir, Jonathan Topham, Frank A. J. L. James, Roger Smith, Graeme Gooday, Crosbie Smith, Ian Higginson, Gillian Beer, Bernard Lightman, Helen Small, Gowan Dawson, Jonathan Smith, James G. Paradis, and Harriet Ritvo

Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

Science Serialized

Bernard Lightman

Gowan Dawson

Jonathan R. Topham

"Significant characteristics of modern scientific journals, including their role in the certification and registration of scientific knowledge, emerged only toward the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The nineteenth century was a period of rapid expansion and diversification in scientific periodicals, and this collection sets the historical exploration of those periodicals on a new footing, examining their distinctive purposes and character. Specifically, it shows the important role they played in expanding, developing, and organizing communities of scientific practitioners and devotees during a century that witnessed blanket transformations in the scientific enterprise"--

Constructing Scientific Communities

Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Richard Noakes

Louise Henson

Written by literary scholars, historians of science, and cultural historians, the twenty-two original essays in this collection explore the intriguing and multifaceted interrelationships between science and culture through the periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging across the spectrum of periodical titles, the six sections comprise: 'Women, Children, and Gender', 'Religious Audiences', 'Naturalizing the Supernatural', 'Contesting New Technologies', 'Professionalization and Journalism', and 'Evolution, Psychology, and Culture'. The essays offer some of the first 'samplings and soundings' from the emergent and richly interdisciplinary field of scholarship on the relations between science and the nineteenth-century media.

Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media

Shuttleworth Sally

Charlotte Brontë's fiction is examined in the context of Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality, and insanity.

Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology

Mary Jacobus

Evelyn Fox Keller

Body/Politics demonstrates how many of the controversies in modern science involve or invoke the feminine body as their battleground. This groundbreaking collection addresses such scientific issues as artificial fertilization, the "crisis" in childbirth management,and the medical invention of "female" maladies and the debates surrounding them. In the process it makes an important attempt to remedy the traditional division between science and non-science by focusing on the interconnection of literary, social, and scientific discourses concerning the female body. The editors have brought together noted feminist scholars and critics from various fields. Contributers include Susan Bordo, Mary Ann Doane, Donna Haraway, Emily Martin, Mary Poovey and Paula A. Treichler.

Sally Shuttleworth

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