Title Medical storyworlds : health, illness, and bodies in Russian and European literature at the turn of the twentieth century / Elena Fratto

Published New York : Columbia University Press, [2021]

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Description 1 online resource : illustrations, maps Contents The grand finale: death as the revelatory ending -- End of story: temporality and the prospect of the ending in Ivan Ilych, Anna Karenina, and the Terminally Ill -- Medical enlightenment in the early 1920s: rhetoric and diffused authorship in Jules Romains's Knock (1923) and Soviet public health campaigns -- Time, agency, and bodily glands: metabolic storytelling in Italo Svevo and Mikhail Bulgakov Summary "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"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 11, 2022) Subject Literature and medicine. Medicine in literature. Health in literature. Death in literature. Russian literature -- 19th century -- Themes, motives Russian literature -- 20th century -- Themes, motives Italian literature -- 20th century -- Themes, motives French literature -- 20th century -- Themes, motives Medicine in Literature LITERARY CRITICISM -- Russian & Former Soviet Union. Death in literature French literature -- Themes, motives Health in literature Italian literature -- Themes, motives Literature and medicine Medicine in literature Russian literature -- Themes, motives Form Electronic book LC no. 2021016643 ISBN 0231554508 9780231554503

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