Affiliation:
1. University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland
Abstract
Medical romance features health care heroes and heroines in a central love story. This article analyzes two contemporary literary examples of the popular but neglected genre of German medical romance, Julya Rabinowich’s Herznovelle (2011) and Irena Brežná’s Schuppenhaut: Ein Liebesroman (2010). This article argues that medical romance performs agile cultural work that ambivalently locates discourses of desire, race, and gender within popular, literary, and medical cultures. Through a range of literary and autofictional strategies, both works reveal how medical romance can reflect and produce bourgeois sexuality and whiteness in contemporary culture. Foregrounding their narrators’ appropriation of colonial imagery, I show that Herznovelle and Schuppenhaut open up critical questions about approaches to decolonization in German studies and medical culture.
Publisher
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Cultural Studies