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9780192848345

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An exhilarating and original book that brings together lyric poetry, the novel, and the history of medicine, Arden Hegele's Romantic Autopsy makes a persuasive case for the shared protocols of diagnosis that directed the reading of bodies and texts alike in the Romantic period. Hegele's illuminating close reading anchors a powerful argument for an interdisciplinary approach to literature and medicine that prioritizes form, figure, and genre. This is an exciting and impressive debut. * Daniel Wright, University of Toronto * With learning and verve, Romantic Autopsy redeems and revitalizes the practice of symptomatic reading, providing a subtle, sensitive account of the practice's late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century origins. Arden Hegele offers a persuasive and original account of how much the authors and the medical practitioners of this period learned from one another's diagnostic procedures as she recovers now-forgotten affinities between practices of interpretation and strategies of medical examination. This is a major contribution to both Romantic literary studies and the medical humanities * Deidre Lynch, Harvard University * Arden Hegele mobilizes startling original evidence that Romantic-era literary and clinical interpretations of illness and death arose together, entwined, irrevocably shaping one another, their shared textual practices giving voice to otherwise inarticulable thought. From early in its history, Hegele proposes, the practice of medicine has been fundamentally a narrative, and even poetic, act. Hegele's comprehensive scholarship supports her break-through findings, paving the way for even more fundamental discoveries about form, close reading, and healing. Simultaneously an authoritative reference work and a breath-taking conceptual flag planted in the fields of medical humanities and critical reading theory, Romantic Autopsy opens wide the quest for deepening the readings of the future. * Rita Charon, Columbia University *

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Arden Hegele is a Medical Humanities Fellow and Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University

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