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Abstract
Popular medical romances contribute to our senses of self and Other, history and the present, race and gender, imperialism and humanitarianism. My dissertation constitutes the first sustained analysis of the cultural significance of medical romance. It reads popular medical romance's articulations of the contested concepts of simultaneously gendered and racialized identity. Working across literary-cultural studies, informed by current scholarship in feminism, postcolonial theory, and transnational print culture studies, I trace the circulation of colonial and neocolonial ideology within novels that articulate the crisis of romance and the romance of medicine. Reading the erotics of medicine and aid against the politics of race and gender in popular medical romances involves critiquing their representations of liberal humanism and feminism, and their investment in the transformative ideals ascribed to the "private" emotion of love.
I begin with a review of the criticism of popular romance and formulate a theoretical framework within which to understand how the genre of popular romance works through numerous subgenres, including the medical romance and its variant forms, which I explore in subsequent chapters. From middle-brow romantic fiction and memoirs to contemporary "chick lit," from imperial medical romances to the urban, and humanitarian, medical romances of more recent years, I perform close readings of and contextualize these texts at their moments of publication, distribution and consumption.
The romanticizing of medicine is a textual strategy that masks a nostalgia for the triumphant colonialisms of the early twentieth century. Medical romances ambivalently obscure the brutal politics of imperialism and neocolonialism by figuring colonial violence as a benevolent narrative of technologized medical authority. This dangerous nostalgia, a counterpart to the rise of neoliberalism within the West, accrues alongside the demonstrably noble intentions of doctors and nurses who labour "in the outposts of empire" for no benefit of their own. These narratives are matched by newer humanitarian romances that juxtapose a Kiplingesque rhetoric of "the white man's burden" onto contemporary geopolitical "crisis-zones." I conclude by suggesting that continuing trajectories of medical romance in film, television, and media spectacles such as "Live Aid" and "Live 8" remain to be mapped.
