Download or read book Disease and Death in Eighteenth Century Literature and Culture written by Allan Ingram and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Literature Medicine During the Eighteenth Century written by Marie Mulvey Roberts and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1993, Literature & Medicine During the Eighteenth Century analyses the close interplay of medicine and literature by paying special attention to questions of body language and the representation of inner life. Although today, medicine and literature are widely seen as falling on different sides of the ‘two cultures’ divide, this was not so in the eighteenth century when doctors, scientists, writers, and artists formed a well-integrated educated elite. Locke, Smollett and Goldsmith were doctors, and physicians such as Erasmus Darwin doubled as poets. Written by leading historians of medicine and eighteenth-century literary critics, this book uncovers the interconnections between medical and psychological theory and ideas of taste, beauty, and genius. Its contributors explore the rich cultural milieu of the period and investigate the ways in which medicine itself contributed to informing a gendered discourse of the world. This book will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and medical historians.
Download or read book Malady and Mortality written by Helen Thomas and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking study examines visual and literary responses to, and representations of, illness, dying and death from the perspective of the chronically ill, their families and carers, medics, artists, photographers, authors, and academics. It encourages a re-examination of cultural taboos and visual and literary practices that engage with illness and death. Focusing upon a wide range of creative and critical engagements, this book makes a significant contribution to the medical humanities via its exploration of medical practice, literature and film, digital media studies, graphic design, and both contemporary and historical attitudes towards illness, death (including infant mortality), mourning and bereavement. For some, the experience of illness provokes feelings of exile, crisis or social critique, whilst for others it instigates utopian discourses predicated upon personal reflection, communication or connectivity, wherein the “self” is redefined beyond the parameters and constraints of the “body”.
Download or read book Death and the Body in the Eighteenth Century Novel written by Jolene Zigarovich and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period's rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses--such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons--the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself--its parts, or its preserved representation--functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory. Zigarovich's analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.
Download or read book Literature and Medicine Volume 1 written by Clark Lawlor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an authoritative and timely account of the relationship between literature and medicine in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, a time when most diseases had no cure, this collection provides a valuable overview of how two dynamic fields influenced and shaped one another. Covering a period in which both medicine and literature underwent frequent and sometimes radical change, the volume examines the complex mutual construction of these two fields via various perspectives: disability, gender, race, rank, sexuality, the global and colonial, politics, ethics, and the visual. Diseases, fashionable and otherwise, such as Defoe's representation of the plague, feature strongly, as authors argue for the role literary genres play in affecting people's experience of physical and mental illness (and health) across the volume. Along with its sister publication, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, this volume offers a major critical overview of the study of literature and medicine.
Download or read book Bellies bowels and entrails in the eighteenth century written by Rebecca Anne Barr and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-08 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France, and Germany.
Download or read book Myth and mis information written by Allan Ingram and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection draws together original scholarship from international contributors on a range of aspects of professional and semi-professional medical work and its relations to British culture. It combines a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, exploring literary and scientific texts, such as satiric poetry, essays, anatomies, advertisements, and the novel, to shed light on the mythologisation and transmission of medical (mis)information through literature and popular culture. It analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, as well as information and beliefs, about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of this period, from early eighteenth-century household remedies to the late nineteenth-century concerns with vaccination that are still relevant today.
Download or read book Literature and Medicine written by Clark Lawlor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an authoritative account of literature and medicine at a vital point in their emergence during the eighteenth century.
Download or read book Reimagining Illness written by Heather Meek and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses. In Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers – Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney – alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals, these writers drew on their learning and literary skill as they engaged with and revised male-dominated medical discourse. Their works provide insight into the experience of suffering and interrogate accepted theories of women’s bodies and minds. In ways relevant both then and now, these women demonstrate how illness might be at once a bodily condition and a malleable construct full of ideological meaning and imaginative possibility. Reimagining Illness offers a new account of the vital period in medico-literary history between 1660 and 1815, revealing how the works of women writers not only represented the medicine of their time but also contributed meaningfully to its developments.
Download or read book Itch Clap Pox written by Noelle Gallagher and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and artIn eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. In this book, literary critic Noelle Gallagher explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art.As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. Gallagher highlights four key concepts associated with the disease, demonstrating how the infection’s symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and nasal deformity. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.
Download or read book The Strange Genius of Mr O written by Carolyn Eastman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-12-11 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkable performer--a gaunt Scottish orator who appeared in a toga--and a story of the United States during the founding era. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Yet he captivated audiences with his eloquence and inaugurated a golden age of American oratory. Examining his roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him, this fascinating book renders a vivid portrait of the United States in the midst of invention.
Download or read book Boswell and the Press written by Donald J. Newman and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-12 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell is the first sustained examination of James Boswell’s ephemeral writing, his contributions to periodicals, his pamphlets, and his broadsides. The essays collected here enhance our comprehension of his interests, capabilities, and proclivities as an author and refine our understanding of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. This book will also be of interest to historians of journalism and the publishing industry of eighteenth-century Britain.
Download or read book Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel written by Maureen Tuthill and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the “glow of health” tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America’s first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.
Download or read book Women Gender and Disease in Eighteenth Century England and France written by Ann Kathleen Doig and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on encyclopedias, medical journals, historical, and literary sources, this collection of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the intersection of women, gender, and disease in England and France. Diverse critical perspectives highlight contributions women made to the scientific and medical communities of the eighteenth century. In spite of obstacles encountered in spaces dominated by men, women became midwives, and wrote self-help manuals on women’s health, hygiene, and domestic economy. Excluded from universities, they nevertheless contributed significantly to such fields as anatomy, botany, medicine, and public health. Enlightenment perspectives on the nature of the female body, childbirth, diseases specific to women, “gender,” sex, “masculinity” and “femininity,” adolescence, and sexual differentiation inform close readings of English and French literary texts. Treatises by Montpellier vitalists influenced intellectuals and physicians such as Nicolas Chambon, Pierre Cabanis, Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe, Jules-Joseph Virey, and Théophile de Bordeu. They impacted the exchange of letters and production of literary works by Julie de Lespinasse, Françoise de Graffigny, Nicolas Chamfort, Mary Astell, Frances Burney, Lawrence Sterne, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. In our post-modern era, these essays raise important questions regarding women as subjects, objects, and readers of the philosophical, medical, and historical discourses that framed the project of enlightenment.
Download or read book Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Sabine Schülting and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing – industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filth in realist novels and slum travelogues; and on the function of dirt for both colonial discourse and its deconstruction in postcolonial writing. They address questions as to how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality. Schülting discusses representations of dirt in a variety of texts by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, James Greenwood, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Arthur Morrison, and others. In addition, she offers a sustained analysis of the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and pays particular attention to those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation.
Download or read book Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History written by G. Rousseau and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-07-03 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout human history illness has been socially interpreted before its range of meanings could be understood and disseminated. Writers of diverse types have been as active in constructing these meanings as doctors, yet it is only recently that literary traditions have been recognized as a rich archive for these interpretations. These essays focus on the methodological hurdles encountered in retrieving these interpretations, called 'framing' by the authors. Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History aims to explain what has been said about these interpretations and to compare their value.
Download or read book Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century written by A. Ingram and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.
