The Age of Hypochondria

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction Interpreting Romantic Hypochondria

   • George C. Grinnell

   Pages 1-27

3. Occupational Hazard: Beddoes and the ‘Great Dark Threat’ of Romantic Medicine

   • George C. Grinnell

   Pages 28-56

4. Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Self-Anatomy of Coleridge’s Aesthetics

   • George C. Grinnell

   Pages 57-84

5. Phantom Memory: Nation and the Absent Body of Idealism in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

   • George C. Grinnell

   Pages 85-119

6. Multiple Personality: De Quincey’s Political Economies of Infirmity

   • George C. Grinnell

   Pages 120-148

7. Performance Anxiety: Illness and The History of Mary Prince

   • George C. Grinnell

   Pages 149-169

8. Coda

   • George C. Grinnell

   Pages 170-177

9. Back Matter

   Pages 178-202

   PDF

Examining the ways in which hypochondria forms both a malady and a metaphor for a range of British Romantic writers, Grinnell contends that this is not one illness amongst many, but a disorder of the very ability to distinguish between illness and health, a malady of interpretation that mediates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions.

• anatomy
• Coleridge
• health
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Romanticism
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• British and Irish Literature

'The Age of Hypochondria demonstrates sound scholarship, highly competent knowledge of its period, and a facile use of current theories of interpretation. Its choice of subject and authors treated will give it a distinct and original place among the roster of good books on Romantic medicine published in recent years.' Hermione de Almeida, Pauline Walter Chair in Comparative Literature, University of Tulsa, USA

GEORGE C. GRINNELL is Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada, where he teaches Critical Theory and Romanticism. He has published articles and book chapters on Romantic-era medicalized discourse as well as biometrics and questions of terror in the period. 

Policies and ethics