10 h 42 minAudiobook10 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 10 h 42 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What can a physician see in a novel—and what might his way of looking leave out?
In The Doctor Looks at Literature, Joseph Collins brings a physician's habits to literary criticism. His essays examine writers through their books, personalities, and psychological concerns. James Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Lawrence become subjects of inquiry as well as artists, raising questions about the connection between a mind and its work.
Joyce offers a particularly demanding case: his fiction challenges familiar ideas about orderly storytelling and acceptable subject matter. Published in 1923, this collection captures an early response to literary experiment. Collins connects medicine with criticism, but his judgments also reflect his own time. This is an encounter with literature, not a neutral guide to psychology.
What you’ll discover
- A physician's way of reading Explore how Collins brings questions about personality and mental life into his judgments of literature.
- Joyce as a challenge Meet fiction that tests familiar expectations about how stories unfold and what they can contain.
- Writers under examination Follow essays on Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Lawrence through the questions that interest a physician.
- Life beside the work Consider the disputed boundary between what an artist creates and the personality behind it.
- Criticism in its time Read an early response to literary experiment while keeping Collins's own historical perspective in view.
Who will love it
For readers who like books about books, who enjoy sharp critics with strong opinions, and who are curious how Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust and Lawrence looked to a doctor of the mind in the 1920s.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Novelists should not lean on Freud
- Joyce records the unconscious without a filter
- Dostoevsky mapped the sick mind first
- Dorothy Richardson makes consciousness the heroine
- Proust shows how memory builds a life
- Women writers who observe rather than confess
- Two diarists who could not escape themselves
- Lawrence tested against biology and ethics
- Pacifists, autobiographers and false confessions
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El médico examina la literatura in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
El médico examina la literatura
by Joseph Collins · 1923
A physician who studies disordered minds sits down with Joyce, Proust and Dostoevsky and tells you what he finds.
Challenging5–10 hours to read2 languages
Aprende un idioma con clásicos de nivel challengingEspañolFrancésAlemánItalianoJaponésPortuguésInglésCómo medimos los niveles
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In short
What does a doctor of the mind see when he reads a novel? Joseph Collins, an American physician who spent his working life with nervous and mental illness, asks exactly that in these essays from the early 1920s.
El médico examina la literatura de un vistazo
- Tiempo de lectura
- Unas 6 h 5 min4 h 50 min fast, 7 h 15 min slow
- Duración
- 87.400 palabras
- Nivel en la biblioteca
- Exigente long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- Primera publicación
- 1923by Joseph Collins
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). Cuánto se tarda en leer los clásicos · Actualizado
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Novelists should not lean on Freud
Collins opens by asking what psychology is, and he admits nobody has a clear answer. For a true picture of human life, he says, we still turn to novelists and historians, who gather far more material than psychologists do.
His warning is aimed at the novelist who sits at the feet of Freud. The writer is offered a complete package of knowledge that explains any character while you wait. He tries a few formulas on life, finds they seem to work, and builds whole books on them.
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¿Qué edición es la adecuada para mí?
- 15-minute summary
- Las ideas clave de todo el libro en unos 10 minutos. Una buena introducción o un repaso.
Detalles
- First published
- 1923
- Language
- Español
- Reading time
- 6 h 55 min
- Level
- Challenging
Cita esta edición
Collins, Joseph. The Doctor Looks at Literature. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-doctor-looks-at-literature.
Collins, J. (2026). The doctor looks at literature. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-doctor-looks-at-literature (Original work published 1923)
Collins, Joseph. The Doctor Looks at Literature. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-doctor-looks-at-literature.
@book{collins2026doctor,
author = {Collins, Joseph},
title = {The Doctor Looks at Literature},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-doctor-looks-at-literature},
note = {First published 1923}
}
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What is The Doctor Looks at Literature about?
It is a collection of essays in which the physician Joseph Collins examines authors such as Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust and Lawrence, asking what their books show about the workings of the mind, memory and the unconscious.
Who are the writers Joseph Collins discusses?
He covers James Joyce, Dostoevsky, Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, Virginia Woolf, the diarists Barbellion and Amiel, Georges Duhamel, D. H. Lawrence and J. St. Loe Strachey.
What does the censor mean in this book?
Collins uses the Freudian idea of a censor, a sort of inner policeman that keeps unwelcome thoughts out of consciousness. He applies it to Dorothy Richardson, whose censor lets almost every thought through to the page.
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