Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920 Vike Martina Plock Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920. Anne Stiles, ed. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2007. Pp. x + 229. $69.95 (cloth). Academic studies on the relation between late-nineteenth-century literature and medical history appear regularly. And indeed, the centrality of the mental sciences for Victorian and modernist literary history has been well documented in studies such as Rick Rylance's Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (2000) or Mark S. Micale's The Mind of Modernism: Medicine Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (2004). But this new and richly detailed collection of essays on turn-of-the-century literature and neurology adds important new dimensions to the ongoing critical debate. By focusing exclusively on the cultural representations of prominent nineteenth-century neuropathological configurations and in consciously moving beyond the application of Freudian paradigms in the analysis of the literary texts, the contributors to this volume recover many fascinating and consequential historical scenarios. Evidently, the research into neurology and neuroscience undertaken here suggests the centrality of this so far unexplored terrain for cultural and literary historians. [End Page 187] The scope of the collection is impressive. It takes account of topics as diverse as Wilkie Collins's and H. G. Wells's fictional renderings of the 1881 trial against the physiologist David Ferrier, who was charged with violating the restriction imposed by the 1876 vivisection act, to emergent Victorian theories of shock and trauma as responses to war and railway accidents. Although some chapters chart familiar intellectual territory—such as Mark Micale's on trauma in the American Civil War which reiterates the well-known narrative of Silas Weir Mitchell's discovery of war neurosis—the bulk of the collection introduces the reader to a range of superb new historical material in the field of nineteenth-century neurology. For example, Andrew Mangham's original essay on dysmorphophobia, the pathological fear of being or becoming physically deformed, offers captivating insights into the historical origins of a commonplace twentieth-century cultural fear while developing an unusual reading of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Doran Gray. Likewise, Don LaCoss analyzes the "magnetic sleep dance" of Magdeleine G., a neurasthenic young woman who, under the influence of hypnotherapy, developed artful dance movements that secured her star performances in the opera houses across western and central Europe between 1904 and 1907. While LaCoss locates this phenomenon persuasively in the context of the fin de siècle decadent arts movement, his essay also foregrounds a particular quality of Neurology and Literature: the collection's interdisciplinary approach. Not only do the essays expectedly synchronize readings of literary and scientific texts, but many contributors also pay particular attention to other artistic formations such as dance or music that were either influenced by or became the subject of nineteenth-century neurological research. James Kennaway's contribution, "Singing the Body Electric: Nervous Music and Sexuality in Fin-de-Siècle Literature," scrutinizes the notorious fin de siècle fear of musical overstimulation of the nervous system. Moreover, Kennaway in this informative survey of the "dangerous" potential of the so-called neudeutsche Schule of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz takes continental writers, especially German writers such as Thomas Mann, into consideration. This international dimension of the collection reminds the reader that the neurological debates spawned in the second half of the nineteenth century were of course characterized by a distinctive multinational outlook. Clearly, studies on nineteenth-century sciences benefit greatly from moving beyond an exclusively Anglo-American focus in the aim to represent, as Anne Stiles puts it, "the cosmopolitan, international nature of the fin-de-siècle scientific community" (7). Neurology and Literature is a wonderful addition to a developing critical field and readers with an interest in nineteenth-century sciences will find this instructive collection of essays both helpful and diverting. If I have one particular aspect to criticize, it would have to be the occa-sional imbalance of attention paid to the scientific and literary texts. The intellectual aim of this study is to illustrate how significantly the works of late-nineteenth-century literary and scientific writers intersected and how they were often...