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Making Sense of Oneself - Medical Advice Literature in Late Nineteenth Century America (Hardcover, Reprint 2016 ed.)
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Making Sense of Oneself - Medical Advice Literature in Late Nineteenth Century America (Hardcover, Reprint 2016 ed.)
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Seeking the key to good living through physical well-being, the
American public since at least the 1830s has devoured literature
proffering medical advice. Making Sense of Self is an historical
analysis of the ideological content of a broad sample of late
nineteenth-century popular advice literature concerning the body
and the mind. At a time when the middle class was threatened with
tumultuous social and economic change, such publications offered
blueprints for self-regulation, teaching survival and discipline,
and bringing some sense of order and hope for
self-improvement.Anita and Michael Fellman analyze this literature
as a signpost to the general aspirations, anxieties, debates, and
assumptions of late Victorian Americans, who were less optimistic
than had been their antebellum forebears about personal and social
progress. In particular, the authors interpret the ideas these
various advisors offered regarding bodily health, the workings of
brain and mind, sexuality, and the will. Although the advice
literature as a whole was diverse and even contradictory, the ethic
of moderation was often stressed as the method, however limited, to
obtain some sense of discipline and control, and the will was
frequently asserted as the means to a more dynamic
self-expression.The sense of fragility, search for security, and
dependence on individual self--governance revealed in this
literature remain as persistent elements in the middle-class
American character. The significance of this popular ideology lies
not in whether it led to specific behavior, but in how it enabled
people to interpret themselves and their situation to themselves
during a period in which many basic ideological issues appeared
more confused than certain. Making Sense of Self offers a close
examination of a period analogous to our own times.
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