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La fibre littéraire : le discours médical sur la lecture au XVIIIe siècle
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ISSN: 16605829 ISBN: 9782600011730 2600011730 Year: 2007 Volume: 70 Publisher: Genève: Librairie Droz S.A.,

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Abstract

Le XVIIIe siècle est celui de la médicalisation de la lecture. Les physiologistes recourent à la fibre nerveuse pour expliquer les maux physiques et psychiques qui frappent désormais ceux et celles qui lisent trop ou qui lisent mal: mais les effets de la lecture dépendent-ils des dispositions organiques du lecteur, de la nature du livre lu ou de pratiques de lecture spécifiques ? La lecture d’un traité médical constitue-t-elle un antidote à la lecture romanesque ? Que dire alors de la grande parenté formelle que certains traités entretiennent avec la littérature licencieuse ? En faisant dialoguer traités médicaux, oeuvres de fiction et manuels de lecture, Alexandre Wenger montre comment la narration romanesque et le discours médical se sont mutuellement servis de ressources et répond à cette double question : que peut la littérature, médicalement parlant ? Que peut la médecine, littérairement parlant ?

Literature & medicine during the eighteenth century
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ISBN: 0415070821 9780415070829 Year: 1993 Publisher: London: Routledge,

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Nowadays medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the 'two cultures' divide. This was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite and often collaborated with each other. Physicians like Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets; novelists such as Tobias Smollett were medically qualified. This close interplay of medicine and literature in the Enlightenment showed in literary ideas and expression - debates raged as to whether writing was itself therapeutic, or possibly a disease. And poets and novelists for their part drew heavily on medical language and learning for their models of human nature, of the action of the emotions and the dialectic of body and psyche." "Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century takes up these themes, paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of the inner life. The chapters include an analysis of dreams and the unconscious; a discussion of the medical theories concerning the prolongation of life, and the way in which novelists picked up on this theme; and the cults of invalidism and hypochondria." "In addition, broader-ranging social historical discussions investigate the relations between the medical colleges and Grub Street, between the emergent professional doctor and the new breed of writers, and the way medicine contributed towards informing a gendered view of the world. A major new exploration of the unity of Enlightenment culture, Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century will be of interest to intellectual historians, literary scholars and medical historians alike.

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