Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel [electronic resource] : Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine /
Tuthill, Maureen.author.
This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the "glow of health" tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America's first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.
Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. A "Very Unfeeling World": The Failure of Social Healing in Rowson's America -- 2. "Your Health and My Happiness": Sickness and Health in The Coquette and Female Quixotism -- 3. "The Best Means of Retaining Health": Self-determined Health and Social Discipline in Early America -- 4. "The Means of Subsistence": Health, Wealth, and Social Affection in a Yellow Fever World -- 5. The "Learned Doctor": Tyler's Literary Endorsement of a Federalist Elite -- 6. "Some Yankee Non-sense about Humanity": Hiding Away African Health in Early American Fiction -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.-.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the "glow of health" tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America's first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.
Literature, Modern-18th century.
America-Literatures.
Fiction.
Literature-History and criticism.
Eighteenth-Century Literature.
North American Literature.
Fiction.
Literary History.