Distributed for University of Wales Press
Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic
Throughout his career, Wilkie Collins made changes to the prototypical gothic scenario, reworking and adapting aristocratic villains, victimized maidens, and medieval castles in order to thrill his Victorian readership. Drawing upon contemporary anxieties introduced by advances in neuroscience and the development of criminology, Collins transformed Moorish castles into modern medical institutions and ghost-fearing heroines into nineteenth-century women who feared the surgeon’s knife. This volume uniquely explores the way in which Collin’s gothic revisions increasingly tackled such medical questions, using the terrain of scientific changes to capitalize on his readers’ fears.
224 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2009
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: ‘A creepy sensation down the spine’
1 ‘Sensation is [his] Frankenstein’: Monomaniac Obsessions in Basil, ‘Mad Monkton’ and The Woman in White
2 The Substance and the Shadow: Invisibility and Immateriality in Armadale
3 ‘My grave is waiting for me there’: Physiological Prisons in The Moonstone
4 Transformation, Epilepsy and Late Victorian Anxieties in Poor Miss Finch
5 The Shadows of the Past: Digging Out Hidden Memory in The Haunted Hotel
6 Mad Scientists: Jezebel’s Daughter and Heart and Science
7 The Quest for Knowledge in ‘I Say No’
8 Born to Kill: the Haunting Taint in The Legacy of Cain
Notes
Bibliography
Index