Narratives of Injury

Narratives of Injury redescribes the history of injury from the perspective of those most at risk, rather than medical professionals and other outsiders, refocusing on the first-hand perspectives found in literary texts and journalistic accounts.

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Narratives of Injury redescribes the history of injury from the perspective of those most at risk, rather than medical professionals and other outsiders. Refocusing on the first-hand perspectives found in literary texts and journalistic accounts, it uncovers a self-conscious tradition of mining stories running through nineteenth-century writing. The book examines both non-canonical authors and famous novelists, including Charles Dickens, Joseph Skipsey, G. A Henty, E. H. Burnett, George Eliot, Edward Tirebuck, H.G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence. These narratives revise our understanding both of injury and of the radical potential of fiction by imaginatively entering the workplace during periods of accident or disaster, in ways previously not thought possible until well into the twentieth century. Sudden physical injuries and their psychological effects have often been configured as fundamentally unknowable by the victims themselves, particularly in studies of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Industrial accidents in the nineteenth century have been described by Paul Fyfe and Matthew Rubery as moments around which fictional narratives circle but ‘refuse to make absolute sense’. Likewise, narratives of psychological trauma have been largely understood, in Cathy Caruth’s words, as the ‘attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place.’ Such readings privilege the reader as a necessary interpreter of physical or psychological injury. By contrast, Imagining Injury reasserts the significance of patients’ own experiences, choices and actions.