Richard's "Nerves": The Physiology of Sensibility in Clarissa

Stephanson, Raymond

doi:10.2307/2709500

Cited by 59 publications

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“…Pažljiva usporedna analiza njihove korespondencije i Clarisse otkriva i vrlo direktne utjecaje. Više u: Stephanson, 1988. 3 Saint-Preux, naime, potječe iz niže društvene klase, što se ispostavlja ključnom preprekom za brak prema shvaćanju Julijinih roditelja.…”

Section: Somatizirana Psihaunclassified

Psihosomatika vrline u doba senzibiliteta

Zagorac

2017

Acta

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* Značajan dio istraživanja za ovaj tekst poduzet je u okviru projekta CONVINce-ME kojemu je autorica voditeljica. Nakon kratkog osvrta na razdoblje druge polovine 18. stoljeća i elemente prema kojima se kao njegova ključna karakteristika izdvajaju ekstenzivne analize fenomena senzibiliteta, rad skicira dva prevalentna pravca istraživanja: prvi, situiran unutar medicinskog diskursa 18. stoljeća koji senzibilitet imenuje uzročnikom "živčanih bolesti" te drugi, onaj filozofijski, koji senzibilitet vidi kao instrument za postizanje vrline. Stapanje medicinsko-filozofijskih dijagnoza oprimjeruje se osvrtom na Rousseauovu naslovnu junakinju iz Julije ili Nove Heloize. Time se zaključno stvaraju pretpostavke za tematiziranje oboljeloga tijela, koje upravo vizualno neugodnim znakovima svoje bolesti svjedoči o moralno ugodnim, dapače i visoko poželjnim, karakteristikama osobe. Ključne riječi: bolest, doba senzibiliteta, Julija ili Nova Heloiza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vrlina UvodTemi psihosomatike vrline pristupamo unutar konteksta ocrtanog u razmatranjima fenomena senzibiliteta, odnosno pod vidom njegove dvovrsne analize poduzete u tzv. pred-romantičarskom razdoblju, situiranom u drugu polovinu 18. stoljeća * . Isprepletenost onovremenih filozofijskih i medicinskih analiza pod utjecajem je dvaju različitih, no međusobno povezanih značenja termina 'senzibilitet': jedno se odnosilo na tjelesnu senzibilnost na podražaje, a drugo na afektivnu, estetsku i moralnu osjetljivost. Tada aktualne filozofske teorije istraživat će senzibilitet kroz temu suosjećanja, posebno se osvrćući na ulogu suosjećanja u konstrukciji moralnosti i društvenosti. Napori medicinara usmjerit će se na somatske pokazatelje složenih procesa komunikativnosti između čovjeka i okoline, kao i unutar čovjeka samog. Književnici će apostrofirati emocionalni aspekt takve komunikativnosti, oblikujući zasebni vid sentimentalne književnosti. U svim istraživanjima senzibiliteta očituje se propusnost granica između pojedinačnog i općeg, (prirodnih) znanosti i filozofije, fizičkoga i moralnoga, između nas i drugih.

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Section: Somatizirana Psihaunclassified

Psihosomatika vrline u doba senzibiliteta

Zagorac

2017

Acta

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“…As Raymond Stephanson shows, 18th-century medical theory supported the notion that one could die of a broken heart. In Richardson’s Clarissa , the heroine ‘dies because of her nervous sensibility, or that intimate relationship of mind and body’ in which ‘one’s mental state can have a direct effect on one’s bodily health (or vice versa )’ (Stephanson 1998, 268).…”

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confidence: 99%

A ‘prodigious latitude’ of words: vocabularies of illness in 18th-century medical treatises and women’s writing

Meek

2021

Med Humanities

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In its examination of a selection of 18th-century medical treatises and women’s writing, this essay considers a range of context-specific and historically specific medical vocabularies and tries to illuminate the various linguistic registers of physicians’ and women’s understandings and experiences of physio-emotional illness. In a preprofessionalised world in which medical and literary cultures overlapped significantly and medical knowledge was not yet restricted to a group of formally trained male elites, vocabularies of illness abounded, oftentimes moving freely between the permeable disciplinary boundaries of the age. Physician writers, in their efforts to define and label the cluster of related conditions commonly known as spleen, vapours, melancholy, or hypochondriacal and hysterical affliction, often operated on a principle of humility, embracing uncertainty, admitting fault and assuming a willingness to question their own assumptions. They recognised that elusive processes were at the heart of these conditions, which came with a vast amalgam of physical and psychological symptoms, as well as a long list of possible designations. For their part, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, Elizabeth Tollet, Anna Seward and Susanna Blamire interpreted with a keen eye the medical information available to them, deployed the plethora of words at their disposal and created their own vocabularies of illness. As they formulated a productively unstable, fluctuating lexicon to conceptualise and define spleen and its analogous conditions, these women writers came up with new words and inventive metonyms, and drew at once on the language of medicine, social and domestic inequality, and the natural world to capture experiences of suffering.

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“…In creating this close identification between mind and body, Burney was in step with the medical thought of her day. Critic Raymond Stephanson comments that for eighteenth‐century theorists, ‘the nerves (conceived variously as involving the circulation of the animal spirits, the tension of fibres, vibrations) are what link body directly to mind’ (269). Other examples can also be found to indicate the inter‐connection Burney perceived between mind and body.…”

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Nerve Theory and Sensibility: ‘Delicacy’ in the Work of Fanny Burney

Crouch

2014

Literature Compass

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Fusing literary studies with the history of medicine and the history of ideas, from the late 1960s George Rousseau, John Mullan, John Dussinger and others have sought to emphasise the importance of nerve theory in providing a physiological underpinning to the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. Trawling the treatises of eighteenth-century physicians, they documented a category known as 'nervous distempers', what we might today call 'psychosomatic illness'. Through the late twentieth century, the results of these surveys were applied to novels of sensibility, providing a new lens for the exploration of Samuel Richardson's, Laurence Sterne's and William Godwin's characterisation. This article suggests that the same methodology is useful in illuminating the novels of the writer, Fanny Burney (1752-1840). It explores Burney's assimilation of nerve theory, with particular attention to the nervous constitutions she attributes to male and female characters in her novels. Weak or delicate nerves are shown to be characterised by Burney as both a hindrance and a help and as operating differently between the genders. It is argued that Burney uses nerve theory in a sophisticated way, linking her characters' medical constitutions with their social behaviour by use of the word 'delicate'. It is shown that in Burney's work, characters with 'delicate' nerves are more at risk of disorders commonly regarded in the eighteenth century as nervous, such as fainting and apoplexies, but are also those most likely to exhibit a benevolent generosity to others. It is concluded that Burney uses delicate nerves as a marker for non-gender-specific intellectualism and sensitivity.

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Richard's "Nerves": The Physiology of Sensibility in Clarissa

Cited by 59 publications

References 0 publications

Psihosomatika vrline u doba senzibiliteta

Psihosomatika vrline u doba senzibiliteta

A ‘prodigious latitude’ of words: vocabularies of illness in 18th-century medical treatises and women’s writing

Nerve Theory and Sensibility: ‘Delicacy’ in the Work of Fanny Burney

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