MACMILLAN Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)

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. Review “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) About the Author 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.