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Book Cover
E-book
Author Bock, Martin, 1951-

Title Joseph Conrad and psychological medicine / Martin Bock
Published Lubbock, Tex. : Texas Tech University Press, ©2002

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Description 1 online resource (xxiii, 277 pages) : illustrations
Contents Lunacy, Conrad, and his doctors. Before Freud ; Conrad's water cures ; Conrad's breakdown -- Reading medically. The vivid, nervous descriptions of Conrad's fiction ; Restraint ; Solitude/seclusion ; Water ; Medical allegory in the later novels -- Conclusion: the heart in its perplexity -- Joseph Conrad's medical entourage
Summary Conrad's life and fiction are often read through the lens of Freudian thought, though Conrad understood his own health from a pre-Freudian perspective. Joseph Conrad and Psychological Medicine recovers that perspective, revises our understanding of Conrad's life, and rethinks the dominant themes of his work in light of pre-Freudian medical psychology. Beginning with a social history of late-nineteenth-century medical psychology and hysteria studies, Bock's study presents a clear and readable synopsis of fin-de-siècle theories of nervous disorder and moral insanity, shows how Conrad's doctors were trained in medical theories that privilege the physiological over the psychological, and describes what Conrad endured during his water cures at Champel-les-Bains and in an English culture that constructed nervous disease-particularly his diagnosed neurasthenia-as a feminine disorder. Joseph Conrad and Psychological Medicine reads Conrad's fiction medically, showing how Conrad's work focuses on such narrative strategies as Conrad's rhetoric of hysteria and enervation and his vivid, nervous descriptions, and it shows how major tropes such as restraint, seclusion, and water- all treatments for insanity-were important issues in the medical discourse of Conrad's day and are themes that run through Conrad's fiction. Bock's study also suggests that Conrad's major breakdown of 1910 was an epiphany, an event Conrad feared for decades but that afterwards allowed him to shift the interests of his fiction. The post-breakdown fiction offers less brooding and more allegorized narrations of Conrad's medical history as he moves towards a greater acceptance, late in his life, of his gender and sexuality
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-258) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
Print version record
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Knowledge -- Psychology
Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Psychology
SUBJECT Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924
Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 fast
Conrad, Joseph. swd
Subject Psychological fiction, English -- History and criticism
Novelists, English -- 20th century -- Psychology
Medical fiction -- History and criticism
Psychology in literature.
Medicine in literature.
Medicine in Literature
Psychology -- history
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
Medicine in literature
Medical fiction
Novelists, English -- Psychology
Psychological fiction, English
Psychology
Psychology in literature
Psychotherapie
Neurasthenie
Psychische stoornissen.
Romans.
Engels.
English Literature.
English.
Languages & Literatures.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2001006418
ISBN 1423766164
9781423766162
1281093270
9781281093271
9786611093273
6611093273