Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660–1820

This book is a substantial critical study of the literary representation of smallpox and its victims.

David E. Shuttleton (Author)

9780521872096, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 May 2007

280 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.3 cm, 0.55 kg

'… important and impressive monograph …' The Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society

Smallpox was a much feared disease until modern times, responsible for many deaths worldwide and reaching epidemic proportions amongst the British population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book is a substantial critical study of the literary representation of the disease and its victims between the Restoration and the development of inoculation against smallpox around 1800. David Shuttleton draws upon a wide range of canonical texts including works by Dryden, Johnson, Steele, Goldsmith and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the latter having experimented with vaccination against smallpox. He reads these texts alongside medical treatises and the rare, but moving writings of smallpox survivors, showing how medical and imaginative writers developed a shared tradition of figurative tropes, myths and metaphors. This fascinating study uncovers the cultural impact of smallpox, and the different ways writers found to come to terms with the terror of disease and death.

Prologue
Introduction: imagining smallpox
Part I. Disease: 1. Contagion by conceit
2. 'What odious change…?': smallpox autopathography
Part II. Death: 3. Smallpox elegy
4. Sentimental smallpox
Part III. Disfigurement: 5. 'Beauty's enemy' and the disfigured woman
6. 'Enamel'd not deform'd': manly disfigurements
Part IV. Prevention: 7. 'Beauty's triumph': inoculation
8. 'Cow mania': vaccination, poetry, and politics
Epilogue
Appendix: smallpox in Georgian portraiture
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]