Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Allan Ingram is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Northumbria, UK. He has published widely on eighteenth-century writing, with a particular interest in the relations between literature, medicine, and madness. His works in this field include The Madhouse of Language (1991) and Cultural Constructions of Madness (2005). Between 2006 and 2009 he was Director of the Leverhulme Trust project ‘Before Depression’, and was a Co-Director of the Leverhulme project, ‘Fashionable Diseases’, of which this volume is one outcome. He has edited Gulliver’s Travels (2012) and was co-editor of a four-volume set of source material, Depression and Melancholy 1660-1800 (2012). Most recently he co-edited a set of essays, Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (2015).Leigh Wetherall Dickson is Senior Lecturer in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature at Northumbria University, UK. She began her career there as a post-doctoral Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded ‘Before Depression 1660-1800’ project. She has written and published extensively upon the experience of presumed mental disease, and was the co-general editor and volume editor for Depression and Melancholy 1600–1800 (2012). She is now one of the directors of ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660–1832’, also funded by the Leverhulme Trust for three years. Her current research focusses upon the relationship between fashion, fame, and illness in the long eighteenth century, and is particularly interested in how the pursuit of fame was viewed as a type of contagious disease.

• Introduction: Fashioning the Unfashionable; Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall Dickson.- PART I: ENNUI.- 1. ‘[F]ictitious [D]istress’ or Veritable Woe?: The Problem of Eighteenth-Century Ennui; Heather Meek.- 2. ‘What is fashionably termed ennui’: Maria Edgeworth Represents the Clinically Bored; Jane Taylor.- PART II: DISEASE OF SEXUALITY.- 3. Dean Swift on the Great Pox: or, The Satirist as Physician; Hermann J. Real.- 4. The à la Mode Disease: Syphilis and Temporality; Emily Cock.- 5. Of Fribblers and Fumblers: Fashioning Male Impotence in the Long Eighteenth Century; Kirsten Juhas.- PART III: INFECTIOUS DISEASES.- 6. Fashioning Unfashionable Plague: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Hélène Dachez.- 7. How Small is Small? Small Pox, Large Presence; Allan Ingram.- 8. ‘Halfe Dead: and rotten at the Coare: my Lord!’: Fashionable and Unfashionable Consumption, from Early Modern to Enlightenment; Clark Lawlor.- PART IV: FASHIONING DEATH.- 9. Death by Inoculation: The Fashioning of Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Smallpox Pamphlets; Kelly McGuire.- 10. Fashion Victim: Suicide, Sociability and High Society in Georgiana Cavendish’s The Sylph; Leigh Wetherall Dickson.- 11. ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’: Jonathan Swift, Madness, and Fashionable Science; Helen Deutsch.- Bibliography.- Index.-

“Disease and Death has the welcoming feel of a book designed to open new areas of enquiry and invite further research; one can only hope such interests will prove infectious.” (Noelle Dückmann Gallagher, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 33 (1), 2020)“This collection of essays proves the continued fruitfulness of exploring the intersections of medicine and literature in eighteenth-century British society, by viewing disease from the perspective of what is ‘fashionable’ and ‘unfashionable’. … Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture traces the intertwined social and narrative shifts in attitude towards these diseases over the long eighteenth century.” (Margaret S. Yoon, The Review of English Studies, April, 2018)“Based on the findings of their Leverhulme Trust-funded ‘Fashionable Diseases’ research project, the editors of and contributors to Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture explore the fascinating intersections of health and medicine, literature, and modish culture. … Ingram and Dickson’s edited collection is an astute and convincing work that sheds much-needed light on the cultural medicalisation processes that populate the pages of eighteenth-century literature.” (Abigail Boucher, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, July, 2017)