She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel is an early part of my book's third chapter ("Diagnosis"). It lands us in the middle of a theoretical section that establishes what I term "free indirect diagnosis:" a play on free indirect discourse that captures the texture of realist narrative engagements with medical perspective. Although page 99 doesn't use the phases "free indirect discourse" or "free indirect diagnosis," it does explore the idea of discourse (I say, "Discourse seems to organize information about a preexisting phenomenon while that organization also produces the very phenomenon it describes") in order to demonstrate the way mid-Victorian conventions for veiling the pregnant body "invite the creation of a discourse of pregnancy because [they] establishes a literary space in which pregnancy seems...unseen, unsaid, unknown."Learn more about Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel at the Ohio State University Press website.
In terms of thematic content, page 99 represents some of the key concerns of my book: narrative techniques for representation, readerly modes of understanding, and an investment in the 19th C medicalization of reproductive bodies. Nonetheless, I don't think the Page 99 Test works very well for my book. Of course, the first book of a literary scholar (which is what this is) is going to contain...densities. I wrote, primarily, for an audience of fellow humanities PhDs and the ideas I explore are inextricably connected to specific, often esoteric conversations in my field. But I hope that most of the pages in my book are less dense and less reliant on a pre-existing understanding of specialized vocabularies than this one. Indeed, the key intervention of my book is an argument for what I call "somatic reading," a mode of reading with attention to the body that not only doesn't require specialized training but that is, perhaps, a little easier to access without it.
It's hardly the case that most pages of my book include examples of somatic reading, include - in other words - readings of Victorian novels that rely, in part, on my own embodied experiences or what I perceive about the embodied experiences of others. Nonetheless, such pages are those that I would consider to be paradigmatic of this book. Such readings matter to me not only because I think they help us read pregnancy in the Victorian novel (which really doesn't want to be read) well, but because they help us read in ways that feel meaningful.
--Marshal Zeringue
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