Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable

Description

This collection examines different aspects of attitudes towards disease and death in writing of the long eighteenth century. Taking three conditions as examples – ennui, sexual diseases and infectious diseases – as well as death itself, contributors explore the ways in which writing of the period placed them within a borderland between fashionability and unfashionability, relating them to current social fashions and trends. These essays also look at ways in which diseases were fashioned into bearing cultural, moral, religious and even political meaning. Works of literature are used as evidence, but also medical writings, personal correspondence and diaries. Diseases or conditions subject to scrutiny include syphilis, male impotence, plague, smallpox and consumption. Death, finally, is looked at both in terms of writers constructing meanings within death and of the fashioning of posthumous reputation. Front Matter ....Pages i-viii Introduction: Fashioning the Unfashionable (Allan Ingram, Leigh Wetherall Dickson)....Pages 1-10 Front Matter ....Pages 11-11 ‘[F]ictitious [D]istress’ or Veritable Woe?: The Problem of Eighteenth-Century Ennui (Heather Meek)....Pages 13-31 ‘What is fashionably termed ennui’: Maria Edgeworth Represents the Clinically Bored (Jane Taylor)....Pages 33-54 Front Matter ....Pages 55-55 The à la Mode Disease: Syphilis and Temporality (Emily Cock)....Pages 57-75 Dean Swift on the Great Pox: Or, The Satirist as Physician (Hermann J. Real)....Pages 77-99 Of Fribblers and Fumblers: Fashioning Male Impotence in the Long Eighteenth Century (Kirsten Juhas)....Pages 101-124 Front Matter ....Pages 125-125 Fashioning Unfashionable Plague: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) (Hélène Dachez)....Pages 127-144 How Small is Small? Small Pox, Large Presence (Allan Ingram)....Pages 145-164 ‘Halfe Dead: and rotten at the Coare: my Lord!’: Fashionable and Unfashionable Consumption, from Early Modern to Enlightenment (Clark Lawlor)....Pages 165-186 Front Matter ....Pages 187-187 Death by Inoculation: The Fashioning of Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Smallpox Pamphlets (Kelly McGuire)....Pages 189-206 Fashion Victim: High Society, Sociability and Suicide in Georgiana Cavendish’s The Sylph (Leigh Wetherall Dickson)....Pages 207-224 ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’: Jonathan Swift, Madness and Fashionable Science (Helen Deutsch)....Pages 225-245 Back Matter ....Pages 247-290