During the project, I studied and closely analysed a corpus of seven texts by four authors of fiction – Sarah Grand, Lucas Malet, Radclyffe Hall, and Emily Holmes Coleman – who lived and wrote across the period 1880s-1930s, alongside representative medical texts from the same period. I compared relationships between these literary and medical texts by analysing the language they used – whether shared or divergent – and also the gaps, feints, slippages of language which reveal hidden narratives about medical authority and patient bodies. Each of the first four work packages examined the work of a different woman writer –– alongside contemporary medical texts and popular reading material. In the analysis of each of these fictional texts I identified and catalogued moments – scenes, sentences, descriptions – in which the body’s internal anatomy appeared in the text, for example the nervous system, the heart, the liver. I considered whether these representations of the biological interior were largely figurative instances, or more often in the form of medical realism. I then considered whether these instances were in line with social and medical norms, and with how organs like the heart tend to be understood in literary criticism about women writers. I read medical texts and newspaper articles from the 1880s to the 1930s, to discover how medicine and society thought about the link between biology and mental health, and how this understanding evolved through this period with the development of new theories of bodily process, and technologies which enabled a deeper understanding of the body, such as increasingly powerful microscopes, the final victory of cell theory over miasma theory, the discovery of vitamins and hormones, increasing use of X-rays. This exploration led to the development of a Senior Postdoc proposal, which successfully obtained funding for three years from Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).
This research has led to four international conference presentations and five invited talks; four workshops both public-facing and for fellow academics, and several forthcoming open-access journal articles in interdisciplinary titles, including one award-winning article in the Journal of Literature and Science.
