A01=Tabitha Sparks
Allan Armadale
Arthur Holmwood
Author_Tabitha Sparks
bonum
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
CD Act
Collins's Novels
Contagious Diseases Acts
Detestable Cruelties
Doctor's Wife
doctors
doctors and marriage plot decline
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Fairy Tale
female
Female Doctor
Flaubert's Madame Bovary
gender and medicine
Grand Influence
Great God Pan
Lady Doctor
Late Physician
Le Doux
Light Princess
literary realism analysis
Lock Hospital
magnum
Magnum Bonum
marriage
Marriage Plot
martha
medical humanities
nineteenth-century empiricism
Ozias Midwinter
plot
science and narrative fiction
Story Club
vicinus
Victorian literature studies
Victorian Marriage Plot
wife
woman
Woman Doctor
Wrongful Confinement
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754668022
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 07 Oct 2009
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's relationship to the marriage plot. Thus, novels that feature romantic doctors almost invariably deny the authority of empiricism, as is the case in George MacDonald's Adela Cathcart. In contrast, works such as Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science, which highlight clinically minded or even sinister doctors, uphold the determining logic of science and, in turn, threaten the novel's romantic plot. By focusing on the figure of the doctor rather than on a scientific theme or medical field, Sparks emulates the Victorian novel's personalization of tropes and belief systems, using the realism associated with the doctor to chart the sustainability of the Victorian novel's central imaginative structure, the marriage plot. As the doctors Sparks examines increasingly stand in for the encroachment of empirical knowledge on a morally formulated artistic genre, their alienation from the marriage plot and its interrelated decline succinctly herald the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of Modernism.
Tabitha Sparks, Assistant Professor of English at McGill University, specializes in the nineteenth-century British novel. Her work has appeared in book collections, and journals including Cultural Studies and the Journal of Narrative Theory.
