Smallpox and the literary imagination, 1660-1820
This book is a substantial critical study of the literary representation of smallpox and its victims. David Shuttleton draws upon works by Dryden, Johnson, Steele, Goldsmith and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to uncover the different ways writers found to come to terms with the terror of disease and death.
eBook, Undefined, 2007
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xiii, 265 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
9780521872096, 052187209X
1158688768
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.