| Description |
1 online resource (viii, 243 pages) |
| Contents |
PART I: RENAISSANCE -- Consumption and Love Melancholy: The Renaissance Tradition -- The 'Golden Disease': Early Modern Religious Consumptions -- PART II: ENLIGHTENMENT -- 'The genteel, linear, consumptive make': the Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental -- 'A consuming malady and a consuming mistress': Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility -- PART III: ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN -- Wasting Poets -- 'Seeming delicately slim': Consumed and Consuming Women -- Meeting Keats in Heaven: David Gray and the Romantic Legacy -- Conclusion: Germ Theory and After |
| Summary |
'The beautiful Lady Mary! How could she die? - and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious! to depart in the hey-day of the young blood - the heart of all passion - the imagination all fire - amid the remembrances of happier days - in the fall of the year - and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves!' (Poe). This fascinating book seeks to explain an important and unanswered question: how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be glamorous and artistic Romantic malady. It argues that literary works (cultural media) are not secondary in our perceptions of disease, but are among the primary determinants of physical experience. In order to explain the apparent disparity between literary myth and bodily reality, it examines literature and medicine from the renaissance to the later Victorian period, and covers a wide range of author and characters, major and minor, British and American (Shakespeare, Sterne, Mary Tighe, Keats, Amelia Opie: Clarissa, Little Eva) |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-232) and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
English literature -- History and criticism.
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Tuberculosis in literature.
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Literature and medicine -- Great Britain -- History
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Romanticism -- Great Britain
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Communicable diseases in literature.
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Tuberculosis.
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Medicine in literature.
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Tuberculosis, Pulmonary
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Medicine in Literature
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History of medicine.
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Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800.
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Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900.
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Poetry by individual poets.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
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Health and Fitness.
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Tuberculosis
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Medicine in literature
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Communicable diseases in literature
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English literature
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Literature and medicine
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Romanticism
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Tuberculosis in literature
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| SUBJECT |
United Kingdom |
| Subject |
Great Britain
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780230625747 |
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0230625746 |
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1280825855 |
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9781280825859 |
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