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Representing empathy : speaking for vulnerable bodies in Victorian medicine and culture
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Miele, Kathryn (2007) Representing empathy : speaking for vulnerable bodies in Victorian medicine and culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2243788~S15
Abstract
The project of defending vulnerable bodies, whose interior experience could only be known
through empathy, helped to develop nineteenth-century epistemologies of selfhood and otherness.
The struggles of authors who wished to represent the sufferings and experiences of others in texts
were influenced by changes in the understanding of perception and evidence (which have lately
received much attention as subjects of historical inquiry). In this project I explore the attempts
that were made by individuals and groups of individuals in the nineteenth century to ‘speak for’
individuals who were perceived as vulnerable: unable or less able, for some reason, to speak for
themselves. I examine the strategies by which these authors attempted to achieve a kind of
knowledge that amounted to sameness in difference with regard to the subjects for whom they
tried to speak. These strategies can be understood as attempts to negotiate the invisible (the
interiority of another individual) through the unseen, using sight in ‘non-sight’ to overcome
empirical barriers to knowledge of the ‘other’. I argue that in the nineteenth century, empathy
became a way of knowing, and a form of knowledge, and that the texts produced surrounding
nineteenth-century ethical and social reform movements are characterized by empathic discourse.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > PR English literature |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Empathy in literature, Social ethics in literature, Social reformers -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century | ||||
Official Date: | December 2007 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of History | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Extent: | 368 leaves | ||||
Language: | eng |
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