The fasting girl: A literary, digital, and medical history of anorexia from the novel to the clinic (1740-1900)
Witte, Jessica C
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115667
Description
Title
The fasting girl: A literary, digital, and medical history of anorexia from the novel to the clinic (1740-1900)
Author(s)
Witte, Jessica C
Issue Date
2022-03-09
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Markley, Robert
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Markley, Robert
Committee Member(s)
Courtemanche, Eleanor
Underwood, Ted
Littlefield, Melissa
D'Arcy Wood, Gillen
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
medical history
anorexia nervosa
digital humanities
victorian literature
Abstract
The negative connotations associated with self-starvation during the late nineteenth century represent a drastic shift from the well-established Western ideology of fasting as a positive religious moral practice. As a result of this paradigm shift, doctors in the later nineteenth century were able to classify anorexia nervosa as a disease independent from other illnesses that caused physical wasting, including hypochondria, hysteria, and tuberculosis. In my dissertation project, I rely on three modes of analysis: a close reading of the characterization of fasting and wasting-related illnesses appear in Clarissa, Wuthering Heights, and Dracula; a medical case study of Sarah Jacob, the “Welsh Fasting Girl”; and a quantitative analysis of digital corpora of Lancet and The British Medical Journal, two prominent medical journals that began publishing in the early nineteenth century. The novels provide a narrative of changing attitudes toward fasting in literature that both illuminate—and are illuminated by—the medical history I discuss in the Jacob case and my digital analysis of the emerging scientific vocabulary of anorexia. In this way, my project explores the broader cultural and scientific issues that redefined questions of women’s relationship to their bodies, appetites, and male medical authority.
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