Raw Material

A surprisingly accessible exponent of one of the newer flavors of cultural criticism, Erin O'Connor serves up four connected case studies of how cultural and literary images of pathology interacted in nineteenth-century Britain. For those who know what they are getting into, this is an enjoyable journey into some fascinatingly morbid byways (in her foreword the author tells us of how in childhood she was enthralled, as was this reviewer, by monster- and freak-books) of Victorian culture. The four nineteenth-century case studies, on the surface, could not be more disparate: Asiatic cholera; breast cancer; early prosthetic limbs coupled (loosely) with amputation and phantom limbs; and, finally, freaks and monsters, of both the P. T. Barnum and the pathology-museum varieties. Her arguments about each of these differ, but all are couched in highly literary, constructivist po-mo terms. Usually I find this talk of signifiers, synecdoche, tropes, metonymy, and catachresis to be tedious in the extreme, a finding that I take to be a character defect of my own. In this particular case, however, I was drawn along briskly, if admittedly at times in a pleasant state of confusion, by O'Connor's story of the way in which Victorian physicians and litterateurs alike managed to export and expropriate the language of disease

Art · Art history · Confusion · Criticism · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Metonymy · Monster · Psychoanalysis · Synecdoche · Theme (computing) · Empathy and Medical Education · History · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology