'The beautiful Lady Mary! How could she die? - and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious! to depart in the hey-day of the young blood - the heart of all passion - the imagination all fire - amid the remembrances of happier days - in the fall of the year - and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves!' (Poe).
This fascinating book seeks to explain an important and unanswered question: how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be 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, it examines literature and medicine from the renaissance to the later Victorian period, and covers a wide range of author and characters, major and minor, British and American (Shakespeare, Sterne, Mary Tighe, Keats, Amelia Opie: Clarissa, Little Eva).
Shortlisted for the 2008 ESSE Book Award in the field of Literatures in the English Language.
'The scholarship displayed in this book - both literary and medical - is immense. Over the past decade there has been increasing interest in the relationship between literature and disease [and] Lawlor's book is a superb contribution to this field of study, as it extends the literary study of consumption back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while significantly broadening this discussion beyond the major consumptive writers... to produce a veritable canon of consumptive writing. Lawlor's book is the best history of this literary disease that we have' - Professor Alan Bewell, Department of English, University of Toronto, Canada
'This book provides much more than the title promises. It explores interpretations of consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) from the Renaissance to the Victorian period...The result is a finely balanced exploration of historical and literary conceptions of consumption from the viewpoints of patients, physicians, and onlookers...Summing Up: Recommended.' - A. E. McKim, Choice
'Clark Lawlor's scholarly account of 'consumption narratives' is to be recommended as a well-informed and engaging contribution to the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary studies addressing the literary representation of disease...Lawlor's fascinating study provides new readings of canonical literary texts, as well as alerting us to lesser-known sources including medical texts, journals and private correspondence to provide a valuable account of the evolving aesthetics of consumption.' - David E. Shuttleton, Journal of Literature and Science
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: RENAISSANCE
Consumption and Love Melancholy: The Renaissance Tradition
The 'Golden Disease': Early Modern Religious Consumptions
PART II: ENLIGHTENMENT
'The genteel, linear, consumptive make': the Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental
'A consuming malady and a consuming mistress': Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility
PART III: ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN
Wasting Poets
'Seeming delicately slim': Consumed and Consuming Women
Meeting Keats in Heaven: David Gray and the Romantic Legacy
Conclusion: Germ Theory and After
Bibliography
Index
CLARK LAWLOR is Reader in English at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He has edited (with Akihito Suzuki) Sciences of Body and Mind in Literature and Science, 1660-1834 (Pickering and Chatto, 2003), and has written many scholarly articles on literature, science and medicine.
Description
'The beautiful Lady Mary! How could she die? - and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious! to depart in the hey-day of the young blood - the heart of all passion - the imagination all fire - amid the remembrances of happier days - in the fall of the year - and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves!' (Poe).
This fascinating book seeks to explain an important and unanswered question: how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be 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, it examines literature and medicine from the renaissance to the later Victorian period, and covers a wide range of author and characters, major and minor, British and American (Shakespeare, Sterne, Mary Tighe, Keats, Amelia Opie: Clarissa, Little Eva).
Reviews
Shortlisted for the 2008 ESSE Book Award in the field of Literatures in the English Language.
'The scholarship displayed in this book - both literary and medical - is immense. Over the past decade there has been increasing interest in the relationship between literature and disease [and] Lawlor's book is a superb contribution to this field of study, as it extends the literary study of consumption back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while significantly broadening this discussion beyond the major consumptive writers... to produce a veritable canon of consumptive writing. Lawlor's book is the best history of this literary disease that we have' - Professor Alan Bewell, Department of English, University of Toronto, Canada
'This book provides much more than the title promises. It explores interpretations of consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) from the Renaissance to the Victorian period...The result is a finely balanced exploration of historical and literary conceptions of consumption from the viewpoints of patients, physicians, and onlookers...Summing Up: Recommended.' - A. E. McKim, Choice
'Clark Lawlor's scholarly account of 'consumption narratives' is to be recommended as a well-informed and engaging contribution to the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary studies addressing the literary representation of disease...Lawlor's fascinating study provides new readings of canonical literary texts, as well as alerting us to lesser-known sources including medical texts, journals and private correspondence to provide a valuable account of the evolving aesthetics of consumption.' - David E. Shuttleton, Journal of Literature and Science
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: RENAISSANCE
Consumption and Love Melancholy: The Renaissance Tradition
The 'Golden Disease': Early Modern Religious Consumptions
PART II: ENLIGHTENMENT
'The genteel, linear, consumptive make': the Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental
'A consuming malady and a consuming mistress': Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility
PART III: ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN
Wasting Poets
'Seeming delicately slim': Consumed and Consuming Women
Meeting Keats in Heaven: David Gray and the Romantic Legacy
Conclusion: Germ Theory and After
Bibliography
Index
Authors
CLARK LAWLOR is Reader in English at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He has edited (with Akihito Suzuki) Sciences of Body and Mind in Literature and Science, 1660-1834 (Pickering and Chatto, 2003), and has written many scholarly articles on literature, science and medicine.
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