Desire and Disorder

Description:

"This book situates eighteenth-century medical fever texts in the broader framework of sentimental culture, reading works by physicians like Sir Richard Manningham, George Fordyce, John Leake, James Carmichael Smyth, and James Lind against various fictions of the period - novels like Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last, Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, J.W. Orderson's Creoleana, William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and poetry like James Grainger's The Sugar Cane and Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Epistle to William Wilberforce." These juxtapositions not only reveal the degree to which physicians deployed the sentimental discourse used by literary artists but also demonstrate that "fever" as a disease and metaphor was a highly fluid construct, evoked for different reasons and shaped according to various cultural imperatives." "Desire and Disorder makes a unique contribution to eighteenth-century studies, introducing and analyzing a body of texts - medical fever writing - until now unexplored for its wide-reaching cultural significance. In addition to these medical essays and treatises, the book draws from a wide range of other documents: novels, poetry, plays, expansionist propaganda, social reform tracts, parliamentary reports, personal correspondence, diaries, and political cartoons. Interdisciplinary in nature, Desire and Disorder will appeal to a variety of readers including medical historians, literary critics, historians of the long eighteenth century, and those concerned with the intersections of popular culture and the sciences."--Jacket.

subjects: English literature,  History and criticism,  Diseases and literature,  History,  Fever in literature,  Human body in literature,  Culture in literature,  Perception in literature,  Medicine in literature,  Sentimentalism in literature,  Sex differences in literature,  Social classes in literature,  English literature, history and criticism, 18th century,  Typhoid Fever,  Tropical Medicine,  Sepsis,  History, 18th Century,  Fever