Matthew L. Reznicek, Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2026) 256 pp. £160.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781805966807
In this detailed, multi-text study of the National Tale genre, Matthew Reznicek demonstrates the enduring importance of the categories of illness, body and health to ideas of nationhood and citizenship. The National Tale, he argues, is a genre that remains ‘deeply invested in the bodily health of its fictional characters, and, thus, the health of the socio-political regimes they represent’ (161). In five text focused chapters, Reznicek utilises The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Ennui (1809), Scott’s Waverly novels and Persuasion (1817), to span the National Tale of the early nineteenth century and argue the importance health, illness and disability plays in the Romantic literary tradition. The National Tale, a genre that uses the romance plot to allegorise the formation and concretisation of a socio-political union, is deeply focused on the body of the nation, and Reznicek traces the origins of the concept of nationhood as represented as a body through Hobbes’ Leviathan, which, he argues, laid the foundation for a continued embodied understanding of a nation-state. The nation as a corporeal body means that illness, disability and health have always been of significant importance to the construction and maintenance of the state. He argues that the politics of health are of intense importance in allowing the National Tale to achieve what necessitates its successful marriage plot. With these texts, Reznicek allows us to understand how the genre of the National Tale helps us to envision citizenship through the categories of health and illness, with the nation frequently represented as ‘able-bodied’, relying on the exclusion of non-normative bodies to achieve stability. However, he also offers an alternative to the politics of exclusion that frequently occur throughout these novels, and shows how the national identity in an embodied state can be in fact strengthened through care.
In the first chapter, ‘With Dignity — Yet with Difficulty: Prothesis, Dependency and Bodily Norms in The Wild Irish Girl’, Reznicek uses Sydney Owenson’s 1806 novel to examine how the politics of health enable potential alternatives of the normative body. The Wild Irish Girl establishes the paradigm for the National Tale, wherein the 1800 Acts of Union become reenacted through the marge of the women representing Ireland and the man who represents England. Through careful and in-depth analysis of the novel, Reznicek demonstrates not solely how the female body is central to the achievement of social and political stability in the National Tale, but also how bodily difference influences this stability.
Following this, the second chapter, ‘Contained by the Epidemic Infection: Disease, Social Disorder and the Nation in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui’, Reznicek demonstrates how the language of illness was used to shape and influence nineteenth-century ideas of citizenship. He brings together the individual body with that of the Irish estate, and demonstrates Edgeworth’s knowledge of health and medicine in the period through her use of miasmatic and contagionist understandings of disease. From this, Reznicek draws this medical knowledge into the wider context of how Edgeworth interrelates the wellbeing of the individual with that of Ireland. Through Ennui, Edgeworth stresses that the cause of bodily illness is an issue of personal mismanagement; this inability to control the body’s own excitability betrays an individual weakness that seeps into the body politic through contagious transmission. Without maintaining the individual body and thus the social body, a healthy society cannot be achieved.
Chapter three, ‘Attacking the most Sensitive Places: The Heart, Circulation, and Belonging in Corinne’ examines how De Stael’s Corinne employs ailments focused on circulation and the heart to establish the dangers posed to the national body politic by foreign bodies. Stael’s Corinne stands apart from the rest of the texts used throughout Tales of Health, all of which seek to narrate the consolidation of nations, through presenting a National Tale that attempts to consolidate a nation that would not be unified until more than fifty years following its publication. Through detailed close reading, Reznicek explores the link between the character Oswald’s ‘leaky’ heart valve and the guilt he carries, believing himself to have violated obligations to his father and to his country. The physical manifestation of guilt through the rupture of Oswald’s heart valve, due to his realisation that he must ‘surrender his own personal and romantic fulfilment’ to fulfil his duties as a citizen, combines health and emotions to subordinate individual desire in order to maintain socio-political stability.Additionally, Corinne becomes a threat to the British political body due to her role as representative of an alternate Italian sovereign and as the ‘force, that animates’ becoming Italy’s alternative heart. By demonstrating the intertwining of the heart and the emotions he shows how discourses of circulation became crucial to understanding of the body of the individual and the body as a political tool to achieve national and social stability.
In the fourth chapter, ‘Excluded by the Very Fiat of Nature: The Processes of Exclusion in the Waverley Novels’, Reznicek illustrates the way in which Scott’s Waverly novels, including The Black Dwarf, demonstrate that sociopolitical stability from an act of union depends upon the exclusion of non-normative or disabled bodies. He argues that the Waverley novels as a collective wield the power of the state and of the social norms to enforce bodily normativity, characterising any body marked as Other as aberrant and excluding them from the community of social belonging. Through understandings of Romantic period interest in maintaining the normative body, Reznicek shows the link between bodily deviation and a presumed moral deviation in works such as Bailie’s Morbid Anatomy. Scott’s novels, he argues, use these ideas of normative bodies to establish limits of social belonging and inclusion. The Waverly novels reinforce the argument that it is only by excluding the atypical body that Great Britain can be formed and consolidated. Only by excluding the Other can the socio-political stability between Scotland and England be achieved, showing that concerns of citizenship are inseparable from concerns about health and disability.
The fifth and final chapter, ‘A Little Lame: Disability, Marriage, and the Reimagining of the National Body in Persuasion’ explores the way that Austen’s novel utilises disability to transgress the marriage plot. Throughout Persuasion, Reznicek argues, there is a consistent subversion of the expected representation of autonomy and dependency. In this subversion, it is care, rather than well-being, that becomes the mechanism through which the nation’s stability becomes achieved and maintained. In the post-Napoleonic nation’s body, then, illness and injury are not a threat; Persuasion, he argues, is a National Tale that functions as an attempt to care for the injured social body of the nation following the Napoleonic Wars. Rather than relying on the exclusion of individual bodies to establish conceptions of citizenship as linked to health, Persuasion demonstrates the possibility of the nation as in fact more stable and responsive when citizenship is rooted in care.
At the close of the work, Reznicek concludes by tracing the role of health and illness further into the nineteenth century into the Condition of England novel. These same biopolitical processes that underpin the National Tale that establish which bodies are included in the body politic of Britain are found in the Condition of England novel. Reznicek argues that, even as the novel moved on from the National Tale, it remained preoccupied with the health of the nation. Throughout his conclusion, he demonstrates that the issues of health, disability and illness remain a ‘dominant metric for determining who is allowed to achieve and maintain the status of citizenship whenever the boundaries of the body politic are destabilized’ (197).
Through rigorous and engrossing studies of the novels of Owenson, Edgeworth, De Stael, Scott, and Austen, Reznicek presents a hugely convincing argument for the intertwined issues of health and citizenship. Through his work, he presents an incredibly detailed and persuasive argument in favour of the importance of medical humanities approaches to the National Tale. Whenever the question of citizenship and belonging returns in a nation’s discourse, we see a return of these discourses of bodily health to determine the boundaries of the category of citizen. By bringing together the politics of the early nineteenth century and the importance of medicine, illness and disability, Reznicek demonstrates the enduring importance of embodied concerns of citizenship. He also sets up further possibilities for future scholars to extend these ideas into their own eras, novels, and bodily conditions.
Lucy Davies, Lancaster University
