Desire and Disorder
Subtitle: Fevers, Fictions, and Feeling in English Georgian Culture
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: September 30, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 297
ISBN-13: 9780838756485
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: 16th to 18th centuries; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; British Isles; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Modern - 18th Century; 18th century; Diseases and literature; English literature; Fever in literature; Great Britain; History; History and criticism
Description: "This book situates eighteenth-century medical fever texts in the broader framework of sentimental culture, reading works by physicians like Sir Richard Manningham, George Fordyce, John Leake, James Carmichael Smyth, and James Lind against various fictions of the period - novels like Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last, Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, J.W.

Orderson's Creoleana, William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and poetry like James Grainger's The Sugar Cane and Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Epistle to William Wilberforce." These juxtapositions not only reveal the degree to which physicians deployed the sentimental discourse used by literary artists but also demonstrate that "fever" as a disease and metaphor was a highly fluid construct, evoked for different reasons and shaped according to various cultural imperatives."

"Desire and Disorder makes a unique contribution to eighteenth-century studies, introducing and analyzing a body of texts - medical fever writing - until now unexplored for its wide-reaching cultural significance. In addition to these medical essays and treatises, the book draws from a wide range of other documents: novels, poetry, plays, expansionist propaganda, social reform tracts, parliamentary reports, personal correspondence, diaries, and political cartoons. Interdisciplinary in nature, Desire and Disorder will appeal to a variety of readers including medical historians, literary critics, historians of the long eighteenth century, and those concerned with the intersections of popular culture and the sciences."--Jacket.