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This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life. Acknowledgments Introduction, Rebecca Totaro Section One: Making the Plague Serve Form and Function, 1563-1666 1: Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire, William Kerwin 2: Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604, Kelly J. Stage 3: Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality, Erin Sullivan Section Two: Governing Bodies in Plague-Time 4: Contagious Figurations: Plague and the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth, Richelle Munkhoff 5: \"Thinking to pass unknown\": Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I, James D. Mardock Section Three: Performances, Playhouses, and the Sites of Re-Creation 6: \"Sweet recreation barred\": The Case for Playgoing in Plague-time, Nichole DeWall 7: Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague: Infections in Speech and Space, Paula S. Berggren 8: \"A plague on both your houses\": Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama, Barbara H. Traister Section Four: Contemporary Turns 9: Plague in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta, Matthew Thiele 10: Dekker’s and Middleton’s Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature, Charles Whitney Afterword: Plague and Metaphor, Ernest B. Gilman Notes on Contributors Index Rebecca Totaro is Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. She is the author of Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton . Ernest Gilman is Professor of English at NYU. He is the author of Plague Writing in Early Modern England .

After the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become synonymous with an opaque biopower that legislates compulsory immunization at a distance. Contemporary illness narratives have become outlets for distrust, misinformation, reckless denialism, and selfish noncompliance. In The Smallpox Report , Fuson Wang rewinds this contemporary impasse between physician and patient back to the Romantic-era origins of vaccination. The book offers a literary-historical account of smallpox vaccination, contending that the disease’s eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. Wang traces our modern pandemic-era crisis of vaccine hesitancy back to Edward Jenner’s publication of his treatise on vaccination in 1798, the first rumblings of an anti-vaccination movement, and vaccination’s formative literary history that included authors such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The book concludes with a re-examination of the current deeply contentious public discourse about vaccines that has arisen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. By recovering the surprisingly literary genres of Romantic-era medical writing, The Smallpox Report models a new literary historical perspective on our own crises of vaccine refusal.

How is illness represented in today's cultural texts? In 'Ghostbodies', Maia Dolphin-Krute argues that the illusive sick body is often made invisible--a ghost--because it does not always fit society's definition of disability. In these pages, she reflectively engages in a philosophical discussion of the lived experience of illness alongside an examination of how language and cultural constructions influence and represent this experience in a variety of forms. The book provides a linguistic mirror through which the reader may see his or her own specific invalidity reflected, enabling an examination of what it is like to live within a ghostbody. In the end, Dolphin-Krute asks--if illness is not what it seems, what then is health?

Medicine and Maladies explores the socio-political and medical contexts that inform depictions of affliction in nineteenth-century France. It asks how cultural representations appropriate, critique, or develop medical discourse, and how medical writings incorporate literary examples to illustrate scientific hypotheses.

Axiology can be summarised as the branch of philosophy which studies the nature of value and values. In this collection, Professor Nicolae Râmbu addresses axiology through the lens of 'illnesses' - drawing on philosophical works from Kant, Nietzsche, Hildebrand, and Fichte; and the literature of Dostoevsky, Goethe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli, amongst many others. The common element among the collection is the explosive nature of values. This book serves as a warning that such sublime things as values can sometimes become so dangerous that they can destroy lives or even entire civilizations. It will be a valuable addition to any library supporting teaching and study in philosophy and the humanities.

This intriguing book examines the ways contagion - or disease - inform and shape a wide variety of nineteenth century texts and contexts. Christiensen dissects the cultural assumptions concerning disease, health, impurity and so on before exploring different perspectives on key themes such as plague, nursing and the hospital environment and focusing on certain key texts including Dicken's Bleak House, Gaskell's Ruth, and Zola's Le Docteur Pascal.