'Narration and Medicine in 18th Century Europe' conference to be held at the Maison Française d'Oxford on 18th April 2008. (360G-Wellcome-085734_Z_08_Z)

The eighteenth-century works of fiction we now call 'novels' were a highly reflexive genre. An obvious illustration of this would be the self-reflective tone of the epistolary form, or in first-person narratives. However, the notion of self-reflection was not limited merely to the formal aspect of early novels: European authors themselves constantly tried to define the form they were writing in, often putting forth definitions of it in their prefaces, and in some cases even expounding the narrative structure of their story. Novelists dwelled on narrative structure and at the same time questioned it profoundly, exploring its possibilities and contradictions. Several narrative devices such as authority, the reading contract, and chronological story-telling were investigated and challenged explicitly by writers like Denis Diderot in France (Jacques le Fataliste) and Laurence Sterne in England (Tristram Shandy). Significantly, novelists regularly chose to explore narration through medical thinking. Literary narratives were thus investigated and sometimes revealed through anatomy, descriptions of the living body, or as experimental accounts. This one-day conference will bring together eighteenth-century specialists coming from various disciplines and several European countries to compare the ways in which literature and medical thought use narrative devices in the 1700s. How do novelists use medical thought, and how does it transform their novel-writing? To what purpose did medical writers use narration, and how does it influence their practice and thought? How does eighteenth-century medicine integrate the questions of narrative in its frames) of thought? How does eighteenth-century fiction assimilate illness or epidemics narratives for its own purposes?