Overview

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watchedfor signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.

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9783031411434

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Reviews

“This title is a monograph … . It has a very detailed table of contents that make it easy to find Boucher’s discussions of individual topics and texts, and each chapter has its own conclusion and works cited. This makes Science, Medicine and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction easy to navigate and use in smaller pieces. This format also makes it ideal for classroom usage as a chapter can easily be excerpted from the whole.” (Ellen Stockstill, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, June 6, 2024)

Author Information

Abigail Boucher is Lecturer in English Literature at Aston University, UK. 

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