Consumption and Literature
Subtitle: The Making of the Romantic Disease
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: January 9, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780230020030
Subjects: Literary studies: 16th to 18th centuries; Literary studies: 19th century; 19th Century English Literature; Medical; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Poetry; Regional, Ethnic, Genre, Specific Subject; Literary Criticism / Poetry; History; English literature; Great Britain; History and criticism; Literature and medicine; Tuberculosis in literature
Description: This fasincating new book seeks to explain an important and unanswered question: how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be the 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, Lawlor examines literature and medicine from the Renaissance to the late Victorian period, and covers a wide range of authors and characters, major and minor, British and American (Shakespeare, Sterne, Mary Tighe, Keats, Amelia Opie).