Mann, Annika (Author)
University of Virginia Press
Physical Details: 288 pages
Language: English
Eighteenth-century British culture was transfixed by the threat of contagion, believing that everyday elements of the surrounding world could transmit deadly maladies from one body to the next. Physicians and medical writers warned of noxious matter circulating through air, bodily fluids, paper, and other materials, while philosophers worried that agitating passions could spread via certain kinds of writing and expression. Eighteenth-century poets and novelists thus had to grapple with the disturbing idea that literary texts might be doubly infectious, communicating dangerous passions and matter both in and on their contaminated pages. In Reading Contagion, Annika Mann argues that the fear of infected books energized aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading, which could alter individual and social bodies by connecting people of all sorts in dangerous ways through print. Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, William Blake, and Mary Shelley ruminate on the potential of textual objects to absorb and transmit contagions with a combination of excitement and dread. This book vividly documents this cultural anxiety while explaining how writers at once reveled in the possibility that reading could transform the world while fearing its ability to infect and destroy.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Annika Mann;
(2018)
Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print
(/isis/citation/CBB854945917/)
Book
Peckham, Robert;
Pomfret, David M.;
(2013)
Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB001214650/)
Article
Gradmann, Christoph;
(2008)
Locating Therapeutic Vaccines in Nineteenth-Century History
(/isis/citation/CBB000831744/)
Article
Rabier, Christelle;
(2013)
Introduction: The Crafting of Medicine in the Early Industrial Age
(/isis/citation/CBB001213358/)
Article
Tulodziecki, Dana;
(2011)
A Case Study in Explanatory Power: John Snow's Conclusions about the Pathology and Transmission of Cholera
(/isis/citation/CBB001024016/)
Book
Price, Leah;
(2014)
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001550103/)
Chapter
Legg, Stephen;
(2013)
Planning Social Hygiene: From Contamination to Contagion in Interwar India
(/isis/citation/CBB001214656/)
Book
Dániel Margócsy;
Somos, Márk;
Joffe, Stephen N.;
(2018)
The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions
(/isis/citation/CBB947458283/)
Book
Krämer, Fabian;
(2014)
Ein Zentaur in London: Lektüre und Beobachtung in der frühneuzeitlichen Naturforschung
(/isis/citation/CBB001510178/)
Chapter
Baggerman, Arianne;
(2007)
The Moral of the Story: Children's Reading and the Catechism of Nature around 1800
(/isis/citation/CBB000775015/)
Book
Margaret DeLacy;
(2017)
Contagionism Catches On: Medical Ideology in Britain, 1730-1800
(/isis/citation/CBB740587461/)
Chapter
Chess, Simone;
(2013)
Performing Blindness: Representing Disability in Early Modern Popular Performance and Print
(/isis/citation/CBB001201698/)
Book
Snow, Stephanie J.;
(2008)
Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World
(/isis/citation/CBB000951519/)
Article
Rodríguez-Ocaña, Esteban;
(2007)
The Social Production of Novelty: Diphtheria Serotherapy, “Herald of the New Medicine”
(/isis/citation/CBB000820144/)
Book
Ostherr, Kirsten;
(2013)
Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies
(/isis/citation/CBB001212070/)
Book
Hannah C. Tweed;
Diane G. Scott;
(2018)
Medical Paratexts from Medieval to Modern: Dissecting the Page
(/isis/citation/CBB835785112/)
Article
Boyle, Marjorie O'Rourke;
(2008)
William Harvey's Anatomy Book and Literary Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB000774859/)
Thesis
Stephen Boyanton;
(2015)
The "Treatise on Cold Damage" and the Formation of Literati Medicine: Social, Epidemiological, and Medical Change in China, 1000–1400
(/isis/citation/CBB950363838/)
Article
Divya Rama Gopalakrishnan;
(2022)
Gomastahs, Peons, Police and Chowdranies: The Role of Indian Subordinate in the Functioning of the Lock Hospitals and the Indian Contagious Diseases Act, 1805 to 1889
(/isis/citation/CBB646215349/)
Book
Gaudillière, Jean-Paul;
Löwy, Ilana;
(2001)
Heredity and Infection: The History of Disease Transmission
(/isis/citation/CBB000101679/)
Medical History
NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin
Science in Context
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Technology and Culture
Be the first to comment!