Download or read book Somatic Fictions written by Athena Vrettos and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the centrality of illness—particularly psychosomatic illness—as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture. It shows how illness shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public, and how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition.