Book Reviews 273 for the fate of those living near Chernobyl was disparaged as "radiophobia ," a government-endorsed psychiatric term). This volume seems to have been therapeutic for its originator, who says in her introduction that in working on it she learned, among other things, patience with suffering and the heaUng power of love. Since the book itself amply embodies both lessons, most mature readers could expect to be moved along the same lines. These are also virtues for the classroom—depending, of course, on the commitment of class members to spend their time with other people's woes. This anthology's large size (647 large pages) makes available a wide variety of genres and contributions in an attractive format (there is plenty of white space, and each item begins on a new page). Its size and weight (about three pounds), unfortunately, also make it a large book for carrying around. By comparison , Jon Mukand's anthology Vital Lines is cheaper and more compact , but it contains only fiction, and the page format is typically tight. And Mukand's poetry anthology Sutured Words is temporarily out of print. So anyone looking for a generous, liberal-spirited anthology in literature and medicine that includes poetry, fiction, and essays should seriously consider this volume. The fact that Walker is the book's pubUsher (as well as its editor) may mean that it will stay in print longer than other literature-and-medicine anthologies, which have vanished too quickly. —John Woodcock Indiana University John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xiii + 251 pp. Clothbound, $54.95. John Wiltshire's Jane Austen and the Body is part of a relatively new wave of criticism that sees the body, long imagined as a site of silence and repression in the Austen canon, as instead at the very center of her cultural project. Wiltshire's extensive readings of Austen's novels also engage with larger debates about the contested territory of the body: the relations between body and gender, the question of constructivist versus essentiaUst notions of disease, and the relation between notions of disease and health. AU of these questions, and many others that Wiltshire poses with reference to specific novels, focus on the contra- 274 BOOK REVIEWS dictory status of the body in culture as simultaneously a locus of what we think of as real experience and as a socially constructed idea whose borders, symptoms, and desires differ across cultures, genders, and individual subjects. Wiltshire sees the body in Austen's work as both produced by culture and as culture-producing. In his discussion of Emma, for example, he identifies a "sociolect" of disease, which serves as a guide to reading characters according to class, gender, and personality. In Sense and Sensibility the body and its symptoms are also readable, but this time within an ideological system dependent on the binary opposition between Elinor Dashwood's rationality, which tries repeatedly to erase connections between emotion and bodily expression, and Marianne Dashwood's sensibility , which reUes on the body as a readable and often spectacular expression of feeling. Marianne's education into sense and, not incidentally , into the marriage plot involves a reorientation of the relations between body and feeUng into a more culturally sanctioned form. In Sanditon, Austen's last (and unfinished) novel about a health resort on the English coast, Wiltshire argues that Austen is, even more directly than in her previous works, taking as her subject the power of disease, or, more accurately, of the discourses of disease, to shape communities. Sanditon, even more than Emma's Highbury, is a culture of disease whose competing discourses of symptoms, cures, and desires form a grid against which the characters can be made intelUgible to each other and to the reader. Wiltshire's readings of individual novels are often persuasive—he is best, perhaps predictably, on Sense and Sensibility, in which there is a sustained and highly symptomatic description of an actual illness. He is, however, less interesting on some of the larger issues raised by his readings and by his provocative theoretical introduction, in which he invokes a series of contributions to those issues from fields as disparate...