Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading

Arden Hegele's Romantic Autopsy explores how literature and medicine collaborated in the 19th century to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. This volume brings together essential works of British Romantic literature with emergent medical disciplines to suggest that symptomatic reading may have originated from Romantic diagnostics.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 14 December 2021
Publisher: Oxford University Press

In the past, we did not anticipate that a symptomatic reading would solely refer to bodily symptoms or that a literary dissection would be purely metaphorical. However, this was not always the case. In his book, Romantic Autopsy, Arden Hegele explores a pivotal period at the turn of the nineteenth century when literature and medicine faced intense competition. Surprisingly, he discovers that these two fields collaborated to create interpretive analogies that viewed literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Together, Romantic readers and doctors developed diagnostic protocols that could be used to identify diseases and interpret fiction and poetry. This volume brings together essential works of British Romantic literature that may initially seem unrelated to medicine, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth, the elegies of Percy Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Hegele argues that these works were historically understood through techniques designed for analyzing diseases. At the same time, autopsy reports and case histories adopted stylistic features associated with literature. Challenging the notion of a growing specialization in Romanticism, these practices suggest that symptomatic reading, a practice still employed and debated today, may have its origins in Romantic diagnostics. Romantic Autopsy is the first study to explore the interconnected literary and medical analytics of British Romanticism, providing valuable insights into the historical roots of our approaches to literary analysis.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192848345