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  1. Home
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  3. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction
  • Cited by 52
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2010
Print publication year:
2009
Online ISBN:
9780511635304
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511635304
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1830-1900, History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (69)
Information

Book description

Jill Matus explores shock in Victorian fiction and psychology with startling results that reconfigure the history of trauma theory. Central to Victorian thinking about consciousness and emotion, shock is a concept that challenged earlier ideas about the relationship between mind and body. Although the new materialist psychology of the mid-nineteenth century made possible the very concept of a wound to the psyche - the recognition, for example, that those who escaped physically unscathed from train crashes or other overwhelming experiences might still have been injured in some significant way - it was Victorian fiction, with its complex explorations of the inner life of the individual and accounts of upheavals in personal identity, that most fully articulated the idea of the haunted, possessed and traumatized subject. This wide-ranging book reshapes our understanding of Victorian theories of mind and memory and reveals the relevance of nineteenth-century culture to contemporary theories of trauma.

Reviews

Review of the hardback:'Matus's book will take its place alongside others in the past decade that have deepened our understanding of the links between psychological and novelistic innovations in the Victorian age.'

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

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