Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale

Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he co-coordinates the Certificate for Arts and Humanities in Medicine. He has published widely on Irish literature from the long nineteenth century. He currently serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine.

• National Bodies, National Health, and National Tales: An Introduction1. With Dignity - Yet with Difficulty: Prosthesis, Dependency, and Bodily Norms in The Wild Irish Girl2. Contaminated by the Epidemic Infection: Disease, Social Disorder, and the Nation in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui3. Attacking the Most Sensitive Places: The Heart, Circulation, and Belonging in Corinne4. Excluded by the Very Fiat of Nature: The Processes of Exclusion in the Waverley Novels5. A Little Lame: Disability, Marriage, and the Re-Imagining of the National Body in PersuasionThe Very Breath of Life: Respiration and the Politics of Health in the Condition of England Novel: A Conclusion

‘Tales of Health is one of the best recent examples of medical humanities approaches in literary studies. The argument is at once a rigorous formal exploration of the national tale and a complexly intersecting disability theoretical provocation about how the non-normative body challenges and constructs our stories of nationhood, citizenship, and belonging.’ - Dr Fuson Wang, University of California Riverside