Published: 2023-06-29

Literature of Exhaustion: Representations of Mental Fatigue in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s „Against Nature" and Wilkie Collins’s „The Woman in White"

Małgorzata Nitka Logo ORCID

Website: https://us.edu.pl/instytut/il/osoby/malgorzata-nitka/
Section: interpretations – exegeses – analyses
https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.11545

Abstract

A phenomenon known well before the onset of modern society, registered as a medical term not until the second half of the 19th century, when physiologists and psychologists inquired into physical and mental exhaustion resulting from excessive work as well as that which had no work-related etiology. Such condition of the severe mental fatigue which entailed deficiency of nerve-force was defined by American neurologist
George M. Beard as neurasthenia. Taking into account scientific studies of enervation, the article examines some late 19th-century literary treatments of exhaustion in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to present them as peculiar, decontextualized cases of exhaustion for exhaustion’s sake.

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Nitka, M. (2023). Literature of Exhaustion: Representations of Mental Fatigue in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s „Against Nature" and Wilkie Collins’s „The Woman in White". Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture, (46), 169–184. https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.11545

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Er(r)go 46 (1/2023)

No. 46 (2023)
Published: 2023-07-03


ISSN: 1508-6305
eISSN: 2544-3186
Ikona DOI 10.31261/errgo

Publisher
University of Silesia Press | Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego i Wydawnictwo Naukowe "Śląsk"

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