Titre :	Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel The Afterlife of Victorian Illness
Type de document :	texte imprimé
Auteurs :	Hosanna Krienke, Auteur
Editeur :	Cambridge University Press
Année de publication :	2021
Importance :	226P
Format :	24CM
Note générale :	Literature, English Literature 1830-1900 Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (
Langues :	Français (fre)
Résumé :	In Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: the Afterlife of Victorian Illness, Hosanna Krienke sheds light on an essential aspect of care that gained momentum in the Victorian era but that has paradoxically often been overlooked by scholars—that is the transitional period of recuperation after a health crisis. This insightful book examines the literary representations and narrative forms of convalescence in five novels: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, and Frances H. Burnett’s The Secret Garden. By drawing from nineteenth-century medical and social discourses on post-acute care, she opens up new perspectives for exploring and interpreting narratives of convalescence in Victorian fiction. In the introduction, she looks back at seminal works such as Miriam Bailin’s The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: the Art of Being Ill or Maria H. Frawley’s Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and explains how critics have so far mainly focused on illness and its implications, but have often not considered convalescent time per se. According to Krienke, convalescence does not correspond to a particular bodily state, a specific diagnosis or a reductive identity position—that of the invalid—potentially entailing a deterministic and teleological trajectory for both the patient and the narrative; it is first and foremost a timescale characterised by its uncertainty—of duration and outcomes—and its ambiguity. Convalescence is indeed envisaged as a pause, a period of respite and leisure for the sufferer existing outside any prognoses of cure and during which social roles, personal values and beliefs as well as interpersonal relationships are open to reassessment. Krienke also argues that such narratives are endowed with a didactic and ethical dimension as these restorative subplots invite readers to view recovery time as an opportunity for tracking and valuing slow progress over the novel’s closure and resolution. This reading experience, like convalescence itself, encourages them to sympathise with others’ plights and to envision restorative care-giving as a model pattern that could foster incremental social change and progress. 2The book is divided into five chapters. In each of them, the author weaves together the analysis of a work of fiction and of historical archives related to a particular area of Victorian post-acute care. Chapter one is dedicated to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. The first section proposes a well-documented account of the gradual spread of philanthropic convalescent homes in Britain. In the nineteenth century, an increasing number of physicians and philanthropists advocated for the creation of a widely accessible aftercare system that would offer equitable personal care to all in domestic-like places, in order to combat the modern ills caused by industrialisation. Malnourishment, polluted environments in cities, insalubrious housing and harsh working conditions represented threats of relapses to the fragile health of working-class patients freshly discharged from hospital. In this chapter, Krienke draws a parallel between the sanitary measures and social ideals of this fast-developing philanthropic movement and the care-giving models presented in Bleak House. She takes George Rouncewell’s shooting gallery as an example: it is ‘a kind of proto-convalescent home; it is a publicly accessible, quasi-domestic caregiving space’ (37). Besides, Krienke affirms that Dickens’s multiple portrayals of convalescent characters and caregivers in this novel fulfil a narrative purpose. According to her, ‘this novel, like the others in this study, is particularly dedicated to habituating readers to extended convalescent timescales’ (38). Readers are taught not to necessarily expect substantial change or definite curative outcomes in convalescent subplots in exchange of long reading time. Finally, she argues that these convalescent care-giving narratives are imbued with a social message: with its many characters who become carers at one moment or another, convalescence care becomes ‘a model of the durative, ongoing attention required to foster progress in a complex system of social inequalities’ (46).

Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel The Afterlife of Victorian Illness [texte imprimé] / Hosanna Krienke, Auteur . - Cambridge University Press, 2021 . - 226P ; 24CM.

Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (
Langues : Français (fre)

Résumé :

In Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: the Afterlife of Victorian Illness, Hosanna Krienke sheds light on an essential aspect of care that gained momentum in the Victorian era but that has paradoxically often been overlooked by scholars—that is the transitional period of recuperation after a health crisis. This insightful book examines the literary representations and narrative forms of convalescence in five novels: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, and Frances H. Burnett’s The Secret Garden. By drawing from nineteenth-century medical and social discourses on post-acute care, she opens up new perspectives for exploring and interpreting narratives of convalescence in Victorian fiction. In the introduction, she looks back at seminal works such as Miriam Bailin’s The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: the Art of Being Ill or Maria H. Frawley’s Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and explains how critics have so far mainly focused on illness and its implications, but have often not considered convalescent time per se. According to Krienke, convalescence does not correspond to a particular bodily state, a specific diagnosis or a reductive identity position—that of the invalid—potentially entailing a deterministic and teleological trajectory for both the patient and the narrative; it is first and foremost a timescale characterised by its uncertainty—of duration and outcomes—and its ambiguity. Convalescence is indeed envisaged as a pause, a period of respite and leisure for the sufferer existing outside any prognoses of cure and during which social roles, personal values and beliefs as well as interpersonal relationships are open to reassessment. Krienke also argues that such narratives are endowed with a didactic and ethical dimension as these restorative subplots invite readers to view recovery time as an opportunity for tracking and valuing slow progress over the novel’s closure and resolution. This reading experience, like convalescence itself, encourages them to sympathise with others’ plights and to envision restorative care-giving as a model pattern that could foster incremental social change and progress. 2The book is divided into five chapters. In each of them, the author weaves together the analysis of a work of fiction and of historical archives related to a particular area of Victorian post-acute care. Chapter one is dedicated to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. The first section proposes a well-documented account of the gradual spread of philanthropic convalescent homes in Britain. In the nineteenth century, an increasing number of physicians and philanthropists advocated for the creation of a widely accessible aftercare system that would offer equitable personal care to all in domestic-like places, in order to combat the modern ills caused by industrialisation. Malnourishment, polluted environments in cities, insalubrious housing and harsh working conditions represented threats of relapses to the fragile health of working-class patients freshly discharged from hospital. In this chapter, Krienke draws a parallel between the sanitary measures and social ideals of this fast-developing philanthropic movement and the care-giving models presented in Bleak House. She takes George Rouncewell’s shooting gallery as an example: it is ‘a kind of proto-convalescent home; it is a publicly accessible, quasi-domestic caregiving space’ (37). Besides, Krienke affirms that Dickens’s multiple portrayals of convalescent characters and caregivers in this novel fulfil a narrative purpose. According to her, ‘this novel, like the others in this study, is particularly dedicated to habituating readers to extended convalescent timescales’ (38). Readers are taught not to necessarily expect substantial change or definite curative outcomes in convalescent subplots in exchange of long reading time. Finally, she argues that these convalescent care-giving narratives are imbued with a social message: with its many characters who become carers at one moment or another, convalescence care becomes ‘a model of the durative, ongoing attention required to foster progress in a complex system of social inequalities’ (46).