Overview

In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional ""therapeutic"" form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of ""health""-what Wright refers to as a ""hygienic"" narrative-both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.

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Erika Wright s Reading for Health brilliantly shows how good health is not only a subject but a strategy of reading and writing worked out in the finest nineteenth-century novels. Good health is a rhetoric and an informing epistemology, constructing not just plots but readers. Wright is canny, sly, and remarkably able to get beneath the surface of novelsand her readers. An exhilarating study. James R. Kincaid, author of Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Annoying the Victorians, and others

Author Information

Erika Wright is an assistant professor of clinical medical education at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, associate director of USC’s HEAL (Humanities, Ethics, Art, and the Law) and Narrative Medicine master’s programs, and a lecturer in USC’s University Park Campus English department.

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