Books by Lawrence Rothfield

This book brings to vivid life the most concentrated surge of creativity in the history of civilization. Launching the Renaissance, the small city of Florence spawned a vibrant cultural and political life that offered unique opportunities for audacious risk taking and reversals to a panoply of memorable individuals.

Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.