Narrating Trauma

<div>Neurasthenia rail shock hysteria. In <i>Narrating Trauma</i> Gretchen Braun traces the nineteenth-century prehistory of those mental and physical responses that we now classify as post-traumatic stress and explores their influence on the Victorian novel. Engaging dialogues between both present-day and nineteenth-century mental science and literature Braun examines novels that show the development of the mental dysfunction known as nervous disorder positing that it was understood not as a failure of reason but instead as an organically based crippling disjunction between the individual mind and its social context-with sufferers inhabiting spaces between sanity and madness. Spanning from the early Victorian period to the fin de siècle and encompassing realist Gothic sentimental and sensation fiction <i>Narrating Trauma</i> studies trauma across works of fiction by Charlotte Brontë Emily Jolly Wilkie Collins George Eliot Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. In doing so Braun brings both nineteenth-century science and current theories of trauma to bear on the narrative patterns that develop around mentally disordered women and men feminized by nervous disorder creating a framework for novelistic critique of modern lifestyles stressors and institutions.</div>