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Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and The Victorian: Literary Imagination
Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and The Victorian: Literary Imagination
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/5085
DOI: 10.4000/miranda.5085
ISSN: 2108-6559
Publisher
Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès
Electronic reference
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, “Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination”,
Miranda [Online], 4 | 2011, Online since 24 June 2011, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http://
journals.openedition.org/miranda/5085 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.5085
REFERENCES
Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 223 p, ISBN 978–0–521–76667–8
1 Why was the Victorian feminine ideal emaciated and consumptive, epitomized by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal, aestheticized as she was dying in Beata
Beatrix? This is one of the questions that Katherine Byrne’s Tuberculosis and the Victorian
Literary Imagination addresses, explaining how pulmonary tuberculosis, or phtisis, a
disease which was at its height in Europe in the nineteenth century influenced “the
construction of the nineteenth-century social body through its pathologising of the
gender, class, and economic and aesthetic status of the individual body” (1).
Consumption not only killed more people than cholera and smallpox combined, but it
was also mysterious as the symptoms associated with consumption were manifold, and
the disease was likely to affect indifferently the brain, skin, lungs or stomach.
Interestingly, as Byrne highlights, the disease enabled Victorian writers to create
textual tropes, whether in relation to purity or sexuality. Through studies of Victorian
novels (or American works of the same period written and set in England, such as
Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady [1881]), as well as British paintings, Byrne looks at
representations of consumption in both Victorian medical writing and cultural
representations.
2 Chapter 1 focuses on nineteenth-century medical discourse on tuberculosis and the
percentage of the population affected by the disease. Its intention is to understand not
only its social significance, but also its cultural significance, particularly manifest in its
appearance in the social problem novel of the 1840s and 1850s. As Byrne makes explicit,
physicians used cultural representations of the disease in their medical writings,
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for consumption to swap place with leukaemia and for images of aesthetic illnesses to
be revamped.
9 Byrne’s tracing of the trajectory of a particular disease and its various symbolical
meanings enables the reader to make his way through literary and medical writings of
the nineteenth century. Even if the grouping of texts may sometimes confuse the
reader, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination is a convincing study of
tuberculosis, a disease which is recurrently shrouded in mystery in Victorian novels.
More significantly still, Byrne’s study underlines the metaphorical power of disease and
its cultural impact and will undoubtedly appeal to students and scholars interested in
nineteenth-century constructions of the body and in interdisciplinary research.
INDEX
Keywords: Victorian novel, Victorian art, tuberculosis, medicine
Mots-clés: roman victorien, art victorien, tuberculose, médecine
AUTHORS
LAURENCE TALAIRACH-VIELMAS
Professeur
Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail
[email protected]
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