|
...of literary sensibility? The question gains urgency when one considers that this disease killed up to 25% of the American and European populations from the 17th to the 19th centuries (5). Lawlor's answer takes him back to the Renaissance, when consumption was understood as love sickness (Chapter One). From there, victims of the disease were considered God's chosen, since consumption allowed its patients to take care of their spiritual affairs before they died (Chapter Two). In the Enlightenment, by contrast, the consumptive look helped to define feminine beauty--thin, delicate, and wasting. Throughout, Lawlor considers both the medical and aesthetic implications of this disease. Literature, he believes, matters: it shapes the way in which people experience their diseases, but not in the ways one expects.
Lawlor begins this study with a chapter on Renaissance lovesickness and consumption. To begin in the Renaissance is to return to the Classical Age, to Hippocrates's and Galen's understandings of the disease (16-18), though not in their actual language. Chapter Two examines how seventeenth-century Protestants associated the disease with theological grace, which the relatively mild symptoms allowed them to do (37). Enlightenment writers like George Cheyne, Defoe, Smollett, Richardson, and Sterne elide nerves with phthisus, and thereby use consumption to enhance male creativity and female beauty (58). Cheyne,...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Wordsworth Circle
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Gothic and the Comic Turn.(Book review), September 22, 2007
Carl Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination.(B..., September 22, 2007
Hermione de Almeida and George Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Rom..., September 22, 2007
Steven E. Jones. Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism...., September 22, 2007
William Wordsworth, Landscape Architect.(Essay), September 22, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.
Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication
name or publication date.
About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company
analysis or best practices in managing your organization,
Goliath can help you meet your business needs.
Our extensive business information databases empower business
professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible,
authoritative information they need to support their business
goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting,
company research or defining management best practices -
Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.
|
%20%20&position=1)