Today, we do not expect a symptomatic reading to refer to bodily symptoms, or a literary dissection to be more than metaphorical. But this was not always true. In Romantic Autopsy, Arden Hegele considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find that the two fields collaborated to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Together, Romantic readers and doctors elaborated protocols of diagnosis-practices for interpretation that could be used to diagnose disease, and to understand fiction and poetry. This volume puts essential works of British Romantic literature that seem at first to have little to do with medicine, such as the lyrics of William Wordsworth, the elegies of Percy Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, back into conversation with emergent medical disciplines of the period -- anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology. Poems and novels, Hegele argues, were historically understood through techniques designed for the analysis of disease; meanwhile, autopsy reports and case histories adopted stylistic features associated with literature. Countering the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, these practices suggest that symptomatic reading (treating a text's superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still used and debated today, might have originated from Romantic diagnostics. The first study of the interconnected literary and medical analytics of British Romanticism, Romantic Autopsy charts an important history underlying our own approaches to literary analysis.

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

Reviews
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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192848345
Author Arden Hegele
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 488g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 161mm * 18mm