Gothic Diagnostics in British Fiction 1830-1897
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Stirling
Department Name: English
Abstract
My dissertation will bring the history of diagnostic anxieties to the centre stage,
focusing not just on the stigmatisation of deviant bodies, as has been customary in Gothic
studies, but the pathologisation of clinical processes in Gothic fiction by writers such as
Samuel Warren, Anna Kingsford, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Berdoe. This PhD will
examine how Gothic diagnostics develop, their reaction to the developments in clinical
methods and instruments, and the way in which they gothicise the relationship between the
diagnoser and the diagnosed. Deploying a New Historicist approach and Medical
Humanities-based methodology, it will compare Gothic fiction, diagnostic manuals and
medical journals, mapping out the evolution of nineteenth-century Gothic diagnostics in
medical and literary texts to determine the synergy between the medical and literary spheres.
focusing not just on the stigmatisation of deviant bodies, as has been customary in Gothic
studies, but the pathologisation of clinical processes in Gothic fiction by writers such as
Samuel Warren, Anna Kingsford, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Berdoe. This PhD will
examine how Gothic diagnostics develop, their reaction to the developments in clinical
methods and instruments, and the way in which they gothicise the relationship between the
diagnoser and the diagnosed. Deploying a New Historicist approach and Medical
Humanities-based methodology, it will compare Gothic fiction, diagnostic manuals and
medical journals, mapping out the evolution of nineteenth-century Gothic diagnostics in
medical and literary texts to determine the synergy between the medical and literary spheres.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Christine Ferguson (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Eeva Savolainen (Student) |