Narratives of Injury

Nineteenth-Century Coalfields Fiction

Rosalyn Buckland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040157596
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Narratives of Injury redescribes the history of injury from the perspective of those most at risk, rather than medical professionals and other outsiders. Refocusing on the first-hand perspectives found in literary texts and journalistic accounts, it uncovers a self-conscious tradition of mining stories running through nineteenth-century writing. The book examines both non-canonical authors and famous novelists, including Charles Dickens, Joseph Skipsey, G. A Henty, E. H. Burnett, George Eliot, Edward Tirebuck, H.G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence. Their narratives revise our understanding both of injury and of the radical potential of fiction. Sudden physical injuries have often been configured as fundamentally unknowable by the victims themselves, particularly in studies of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Likewise, narratives of psychological trauma have been largely understood, in Cathy Caruth's words, as the 'attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place.' Such readings privilege the reader as a necessary interpreter of physical or psychological injury. By contrast, Narratives of Injury reasserts the significance of patients' own experiences, choices and actions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Pre-empting Accident: Household Words and Dickens’ Hard Times
• 2 Real-Time Disaster: Joseph Skipsey and the Hartley Colliery Disaster
• 3 The Coalfields Novel and Eliot’s Felix Holt
• 4 Long-Term Trauma: Zola’s Germinal and Tirebuck’s Miss Grace of All Souls’
• 5 Universal Healthcare: H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, In the Days of the Comet and Meanwhile
• 6 Implications for the Canon: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index