Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England

Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England PDF Author: M. Healy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230510647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
How did early modern people imagine their bodies? What impact did the new disease syphilis and recurrent outbreaks of plague have on these mental landscapes? Why was the glutted belly such a potent symbol of pathology? Ranging from the Reformation through the English Civil War, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England is a unique study of a fascinating cultural imaginary of 'disease' and its political consequences. Healy's original approach illuminates the period's disease-impregnated literature, including works by Shakespeare, Milton, Dekker, Heywood and others.

Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England

Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England PDF Author: M. Healy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230510647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
How did early modern people imagine their bodies? What impact did the new disease syphilis and recurrent outbreaks of plague have on these mental landscapes? Why was the glutted belly such a potent symbol of pathology? Ranging from the Reformation through the English Civil War, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England is a unique study of a fascinating cultural imaginary of 'disease' and its political consequences. Healy's original approach illuminates the period's disease-impregnated literature, including works by Shakespeare, Milton, Dekker, Heywood and others.

Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Representing the Plague in Early Modern England PDF Author: Rebecca Totaro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136963243
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life.

Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England

Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131706321X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health ” physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.

Fictions of Disease

Fictions of Disease PDF Author: Margaret Jane Healy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description


Ill Composed

Ill Composed PDF Author: Olivia Weisser
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300200706
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In the first in-depth study of how gender determined perceptions and experiences of illness in early modern England, Olivia Weisser invites readers into the lives and imaginations of ordinary seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal diaries, medical texts, and devotional literature, this unique cultural history enters the sickrooms of a diverse sampling of men and women, from a struggling Manchester wigmaker to the diarist Samuel Pepys. The resulting stories of sickness offer unprecedented insight into what it was like to live, suffer, and inhabit a body in England more than three centuries ago.

Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England

Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England PDF Author: Gabriel A. Rieger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351900943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Drawing upon recent scholarship in Renaissance studies regarding notions of the body, political, physical and social, this study examines how the satiric tragedians of the English Renaissance employ the languages of sex - including sexual slander, titillation, insinuation and obscenity - in the service of satiric aggression. There is a close association between the genre of satire and sexually descriptive language in the period, author Gabriel Rieger argues, particularly in the ways in which both the genre and the languages embody systems of oppositions. In exploring the various purposes which sexually descriptive language serves for the satiric tragedian, Rieger reviews a broad range of texts, ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary, by satiric tragedians, moralists, medical writers and critics, paying particular attention to the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and John Webster

Renaissance Transformations

Renaissance Transformations PDF Author: Margaret Healy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748642102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing 1500-1650 asserts the centrality of historical understanding in shaping critical vision. This collection of distinctive new essays explores the dynamic cultural, intellectual and social processes that moulded literary writing in the Renaissance. Acutely attentive to the complexities that we confront in our attempts to understand the past, this book explores important relations among literary form, material and imaginative culture which compel our attention in the twenty-first century. Addressing three crucial areas at the forefront of current academic inquiry - 'Making Writing: Form, Rhetoric and Print Culture', 'Shaping Communities: Textual Spaces, Mapping History' and 'Embodying Change: Psychic and Somatic Performances' - this innovative, timely volume is of fundamental importance to all those who study and teach Renaissance literature, history and culture. Contributors are Danielle Clarke, Andrew Hadfield, Margaret Healy, Thomas Healy, Bernhard Klein, Michelle O'Callaghan, Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards Michael Schoenfeldt, William Sherman, Alan Stewart, and Susan Wiseman.

In the Wake of the Plague

In the Wake of the Plague PDF Author: Norman F. Cantor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684857359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"Norman Cantor draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death afresh, as a gripping, intimate narrative." "In the Wake of the Plague presents a microcosmic view of the Plague in England (and on the continent), telling the stories of the men and women of the fourteenth century, from peasant to priest, and from merchant to king. We meet, among others, fifteen-year-old Princess Joan of England, on her way to Spain to marry a Castilian prince; Thomas of Birmingham, abbot of Halesowen, responsible for his abbey as a CEO is for his business in a desperate time; and the once-prominent landowner John le Strange, who sees the Black Death tear away his family's lands and then its very name as it washes, unchecked, over Europe in wave after wave."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic

Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic PDF Author: Todd Howard James Pettigrew
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874139518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
By Shakespeare's time, the debate over legitimate medical practice had become vociferous and public. The powerful College of Physicians fought hard to discredit some and rein in others, but many resisted, denied, or ignored its authority. Dramatists did not fail to notice the turmoil, nor did they fail to comment on it - and no one commented more profoundly on stage than William Shakespeare. Going beyond the usual questions posed about Shakespeare and medicine, this study, which won the first Jay L. Halio Prize in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies, explores Shakespeare's response to the early modern struggle for control of English medical practice. It does not rehearse the fundamentals of early modern medical thought such as the humoral system that have been more than adequately covered numerous times elsewhere. Instead, it undertakes a reading of popular English medical tracts in an effort to reconstruct the terms in which medical practitioners of all kinds were understood. injury were busy hearing such stories, and in a time of spectacular outbreaks of infectious disease, in a time of religious transition, and in a time of shifting modes of political power, such stories held especial fascination. Todd Pettigrew is an Associate Professor Cape Breton University.

A Journal of the Plague Year Annotated Edition

A Journal of the Plague Year Annotated Edition PDF Author: Daniel Defoe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
A new, beautifully laid-out edition of Daniel Defoe's 1722 classic. This novel is an account of one man's eyewitness experiences in the city of London in the year 1665, as the city is overrun with the Bubonic Plague. A Journal of the Plague Year takes us down to street level, gripping with the reality of disease and death during one of the darkest periods known to man. As the modern world struggles to come to terms with similar threats, Defoe's work is as relevant as ever.This special edition is designed to be compact, but readable. Use Amazon's LookInside feature to judge for yourself.