Arden Hegele's new book, Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading, is out today from Oxford University Press.
Romantic Autopsy considers how the poetry and prose of British Romanticism was written in conversation with the field of medicine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Beyond thematic connections, the book finds literature and medicine engaging at the level of form and genre. The book will appeal to anyone interested in, for example, how Pride and Prejudice shares stylistic techniques with diaries of Bedlam mad-doctors; how Wordsworth and Keats borrow tropes of battlefield dissection from the French Revolution; or how Beethoven and Byron are portrayed in their medical reports.
Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University will be having a virtual book launch celebration with some wonderful speakers; to join the guest list in advance, please register here.
