Budget Amount *help |
¥3,510,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥810,000)
Fiscal Year 2014: ¥910,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥210,000)
Fiscal Year 2013: ¥910,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥210,000)
Fiscal Year 2012: ¥780,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥180,000)
Fiscal Year 2011: ¥910,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥210,000)
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Outline of Final Research Achievements |
This study explores the discourse in 19th and early 20th American fiction concerning the female body, in particular, how women’s health and illness are addressed. The novels of the writers I discuss--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wiiliam Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, Edith Wharton, and others--reflect a wide range of 'turn of the century' views related to medicine: the etiology of physical and psychological diseases, spiritualism, materialism, New Thought cults, the role of doctors, and the newly establish profession of nursing. One of my interests is "neurasthenia," which was considered at the time to have been born out of rapid industrialization and urbanization, yet the study reveals that the novels represent the condition as arising out of unarticulated anxieties and complaints that resist uniform interpretations. My research argues that the women’s spirituality, which offered women wider social access, leads them―paradoxically―to be defined physically and materially.
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