TY - BOOK AU - Buckland,Rosalyn TI - Narratives of injury: nineteenth-century coalfields fiction T2 - Routledge studies in literature and health humanities SN - 9781003478973 U1 - 823/.8093553 23/eng/20240725 PY - 2025/// CY - New York, NY PB - Routledge KW - English fiction KW - 19th century KW - History and criticism KW - Coalfields in literature KW - Industrial accidents in literature KW - Coal mine accidents in literature KW - Wounds and injuries in literature KW - Psychic trauma in literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / General N1 - Pre-empting accident: Household words and Dickens' Hard times -- Real-time disaster: Joseph Skipsey and the Hartley Colliery disaster -- The coalfields novel and Eliot's Felix Holt -- Long-term trauma: Zola's Germinal and Tirebuck's Miss Grace of all souls' -- Universal healthcare: Wells' The time machine, In the days of the comet and Meanwhile -- Implications for the canon: D. H. Lawrence's Sons and lovers N2 - "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"-- UR - https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003478973 ER -