History, Motion Sickness, and the Discomfort of Mansfield Park

Abstract: As she brings to view the theories of mediation that organized medical semiotics and pathology in eighteenth-century Europe, Kevis Goodman gives us a longer, deeper history of twentieth-century historical materialism. She thereby revitalizes this historical materialism's accounts of how the artwork can serve as the historiography of its epoch. This short essay supplements Goodman's concentration on the Romantic lyric by turning to narrative fiction, building on the fact that in general the novel form was the literary genre that focused those earlier accounts. The essay then extends Goodman's discussion of the diseases of the dislocated by considering the example of Fanny Price, Jane Austen's protagonist in her Mansfield Park , and through that novel taking a second look at the nostalgia that has so often been associated with the reception of Austen's fiction.