Title The smallpox report : vaccination and the romantic illness narrative / Fuson Wang

Published Toronto ; Buffalo ; London : University of Toronto Press, [2023] ©2023

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Description 1 online resource (x, 248 pages) : color illustrations Contents Wordsworth's Romantic Path to Biopower -- Darwin's Evolutionary Metaphor -- Blake's Revolutionary Metaphor -- Keats and the End of Disease -- Shelley and Romantic Immunity -- The Case of Sherlock Holmes Summary "After the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become synonymous with an opaque biopower that legislates compulsory immunization at a distance. Contemporary illness narratives have become outlets for distrust, misinformation, reckless denialism, and selfish noncompliance. In The Smallpox Report, Fuson Wang rewinds this contemporary impasse between physician and patient back to the Romantic-era origins of vaccination. The book offers a literary-historical account of smallpox vaccination, contending that the disease's eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. Wang traces our modern, pandemic-era crisis of vaccine hesitancy back to Edward Jenner's publication of his treatise on vaccination in 1798, the first rumblings of an anti-vaccination movement, and vaccination's formative literary history that included authors such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The book concludes with a re-examination of the current deeply polarized and polarizing public discourse about vaccines in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. By recovering the surprisingly literary genres of Romantic-era medical writing, The Smallpox Report models a new literary historical perspective on our own crises of vaccine refusal."-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 27, 2023) Subject English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism Literature and medicine -- England -- History -- 18th century Vaccination -- England -- History -- 18th century Medicine in literature. Vaccination in literature. Smallpox in literature. Diseases in literature. Romanticism -- England LITERARY CRITICISM / Gothic & Romance Diseases in literature English literature Literature and medicine Medicine in literature Romanticism Smallpox in literature Vaccination Vaccination in literature England Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Literary criticism. Critiques littéraires. Form Electronic book ISBN 9781487546625 1487546629 1487546602 9781487546601

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