A01=Louise Benson James
Author_Louise Benson James
Body
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=JBSF1
Disorder
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Fiction
Gender
Medicine
Modernist
Victorian
Women
Product details
- ISBN 9781399523080
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book looks afresh at the history of hysteria to nuance and complicate existing understandings of the relationship between medicine and women’s writing. Through in-depth analyses of both medical texts and women’s fiction published between the 1850s and 1930s, it documents the prevalence of scientific ideas in popular culture and how hysterical symptomatology has been appropriated, reworked and satirised in literature. Examining novels and short stories by Charlotte Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Sarah Grand, Lucas Malet and Djuna Barnes, Medicine and Women’s Fiction traces women writers’ fascination with the materiality and instability of the body, troubling inherited truths about mental health and gender in literary and medical discourse. In contrast to stereotypical images of hysteria, it draws particular attention to disorder as part of everyday experience: the familiar, mundane ways in which the body goes out of control, from involuntary movements to ghostly hallucinations and unruly organs. Altogether, Louise Benson James re-evaluates what it means to take hysteria seriously in fiction.
Louise Benson James is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. After completing her PhD at the University of Bristol in 2020, she was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, followed by a Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research focuses on literature, culture and medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly representations of hysteria, nervous disorder, internal organs and the digestive system in women’s fiction, popular fiction and periodicals.
