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Description of  Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders

Neurasthenia, rail shock, hysteria. In Narrating Trauma, Gretchen Braun traces the nineteenth-century prehistory of those mental and physical responses that we now classify as post-traumatic stress and explores their influence on the Victorian novel. Engaging dialogues between both present-day and nineteenth-century mental science and literature, Braun examines novels that show the development of the mental dysfunction known as nervous disorder, positing that it was understood not as a failure of reason but instead as an organically based, crippling disjunction between the individual mind and its social contextwith sufferers inhabiting spaces between sanity and madness. Spanning from the early Victorian period to the fin de sicle and encompassing realist, Gothic, sentimental, and sensation fiction, Read more