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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.
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.
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.
Author: Rebecca Totaro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136963235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 546
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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.
Author: Kevin M. Sharpe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521824347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
This book charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts in early modern England.
Author: Hannah Newton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199650497
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Illness in childhood was common in early modern England. Hannah Newton asks how sick children were perceived and treated by doctors and laypeople, examines the family's experience, and takes the original perspective of sick children themselves. She provides rare and intimate insights into the experiences of sickness, pain, and death.
Author: Ellen MacKay
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226500195
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The theatre of early modern England was a disastrous affair. What we tend to remember of the Shakespearean stage and its history are landmark moments of dissolution. This title is a study of these catastrophes and the theory of performance they convey.
Author: Noelle Gallagher
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240767
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
A lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and artIn eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. In this book, literary critic Noelle Gallagher explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art.As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. Gallagher highlights four key concepts associated with the disease, demonstrating how the infection’s symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and nasal deformity. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.
Author: Craig Rustici
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472024698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Amid the religious tumult of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English scholars, preachers, and dramatists examined, debated, and refashioned tales concerning Pope Joan, a ninth-century woman who, as legend has it, cross-dressed her way to the papacy only to have her imposture exposed when she gave birth during a solemn procession. The legend concerning a popess had first taken written form in the thirteenth century and for several hundred years was more or less accepted. The Reformation, however, polarized discussions of the legend, pitting Catholics, who denied the story’s veracity, against Protestants, who suspected a cover-up and instantly cited Joan as evidence of papal depravity. In this heated environment, writers reimagined Joan variously as a sorceress, a hermaphrodite, and even a noteworthy author. The Afterlife of Pope Joan examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates concerning the popess’s existence, uncovering the disputants’ historiographic methods, rules of evidence, rhetorical devices, and assumptions concerning what is probable and possible for women and transvestites. Author Craig Rustici then investigates the cultural significance of a series of notions advanced in those debates: the claim that Queen Elizabeth I was a popess in her own right, the charge that Joan penned a book of sorcery, and the curious hypothesis that the popess was not a disguised woman at all but rather a man who experienced a sort of spontaneous sex change. The Afterlife of Pope Joan draws upon the discourses of religion, politics, natural philosophy, and imaginative literature, demonstrating how the popess functioned as a powerful rhetorical instrument and revealing anxieties and ambivalences about gender roles that persist even today. Craig M. Rustici is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University.
Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137487534
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer – as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body – remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.
Author: Clark Lawlor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108368980
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Offering an authoritative and timely account of the relationship between literature and medicine in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, a time when most diseases had no cure, this collection provides a valuable overview of how two dynamic fields influenced and shaped one another. Covering a period in which both medicine and literature underwent frequent and sometimes radical change, the volume examines the complex mutual construction of these two fields via various perspectives: disability, gender, race, rank, sexuality, the global and colonial, politics, ethics, and the visual. Diseases, fashionable and otherwise, such as Defoe's representation of the plague, feature strongly, as authors argue for the role literary genres play in affecting people's experience of physical and mental illness (and health) across the volume. Along with its sister publication, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, this volume offers a major critical overview of the study of literature and medicine.
