Medical Storyworlds : : Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century / / Elena Fratto.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Fratto, Elena,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Though often seen as scientific or objective, medicine has a fundamentally narrative aspect. Much like how an author constructs meaning around fictional events, a doctor or patient narrates the course of an illness and treatment. In what ways have literary and medical storytelling intersected with and shaped each other?In Medical Storyworlds, Elena Fratto examines the relationship between literature and medicine at the turn of the twentieth century—a period when novelists were experimenting with narrative form and the modern medical establishment was taking shape. She traces how Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov responded to contemporary medical and public health prescriptions, placing them in dialogue with French and Italian authors including Romains and Svevo and such texts as treatises by Paul Broca and Cesare Lombroso. In nuanced readings of these works, Fratto reveals how authors and characters question the rhetoric and authority of medicine and public health in telling stories of mortality, illness, and well-being. In so doing, she argues, they provide alternative ways of thinking about the limits and possibilities of human agency and free will. Bridging the medical humanities, European literary studies, and Slavic studies, Medical Storyworlds shows how narrative theory and canonical literary texts offer a new lens on today’s debates in medical ethics and bioethics.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- Chapter One. THE GRAND FINALE: Death as the Revelatory Ending -- Chapter Two. END OF STORY: Temporality and the Prospect of the Ending in Ivan Ilych, Anna Karenina, and (Potential) Cancer Patients -- Chapter Three. MEDICAL ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE EARLY 1920S: Rhetoric and Diffused Authorship in Jules Romains’s Knock and Soviet Public- Health Campaigns -- Chapter Four. TIME, AGENCY, AND BODILY GLANDS: Metabolic Storytelling in Italo Svevo and Mikhail Bulgakov -- AFTERWORD -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX