Romanticism and colonial disease / Alan Bewell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bewell, Alan, 1951-

Series:

Medicine & culture

Medicine and Culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Diseases--History--Colonies--Great Britain.

Diseases.

History.

Colonies.

Medicine.

Great Britain.

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Diseases in literature.

Colonies in literature.

Medicine--History--18th century.

Medicine--History--19th century.

Physical Description:

xv, 373 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [1999]

Summary:

Colonial experience was profoundly structured by disease, as expansion brought people into contact with new and deadly maladies. Pathogens were exchanged on a scale far greater than ever before. Native populations were decimated by wave after wave of Old World diseases. In turn, colonists suffered disease and mortality rates much higher than in their home countries. Not only disease, but the idea of disease, and the response to it, deeply affected both colonizers and those colonized.

In Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Alan Bewell focuses on the British response to colonial disease as medical and literary writers, in a period roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, grappled to understand this new world of disease. Bewell finds this literature characterized by increasing anxiety about the global dimensions of disease and the epidemiological cost of empire. Colonialism infiltrated the heart of Romantic literature, affecting not only the Romantics' framing of disease but also their understanding of England's position in the colonial world.

This major study of the massive impact of colonial disease on British culture charts the emergence of the idea of the colonial world as a pathogenic space in need of a cure, and examines the role of disease in the making and unmaking of national identities.

Contents:

1 Romantic Medical Geography: Empire, Disease, and the Construction of Pathogenic Environments 27

2 "Voices of Dead Complaint": Colonial Military Disease Narratives 66

3 Colonial Dietary Anxieties 131

4 Keats and the Geography of Consumption 161

5 Joseph Ritchie and "The Diseased Heart of Africa" 194

6 Percy Bysshe Shelley and Revolutionary Climatology 205

7 Cholera, Sanitation, and the Colonial Representation of India 242

8 Tropical Invalids 277

9 "All the World Has the Plague": Mary Shelley's The Last Man 296.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0801862256

OCLC:

41368379