The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Examining the ways in which hypochondria forms both a malady and a metaphor for a range of British Romantic writers, Grinnell contends that this is not one illness amongst many, but a disorder of the very ability to distinguish between illness and health, a malady of interpretation that mediates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions. What if the experience of hypochondria was not simply one of imagined infirmity? In an age in which health was increasingly policied in terms of moral as well as physical well-being, writers at the turn of the nineteenth century viewed hypochondria as a malady and a metaphor for the difficulty of discerning health in the body. As a troubling laceration in normalizing efforts to determine the body as either ideally healthy or improperly sick, hypochondria mediated a range of social and political concerns and became a figure of interpretation for the ways in which the corporeal body elludes our efforts to know it. The Age of Hypochondria examines several episodes of hypochondria, in works by Thomas Beddoes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey and Mary Prince, in order to suggest why fictions of health - and obsessions with disease - may have become so pervasive in the Romantic era Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 List of Illustrations......Page 9 Acknowledgments......Page 10 List of Abbreviations......Page 12 Introduction: Interpreting Romantic Hypochondria......Page 14 1 Occupational Hazard: Beddoes and the 'Great Dark Threat' of Romantic Medicine......Page 41 2 Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Self-Anatomy of Coleridge's Aesthetics......Page 70 3 Phantom Memory: Nation and the Absent Body of Idealism in Mary Shelley's The Last Man......Page 98 4 Multiple Personality: De Quincey's Political Economies of Infirmity......Page 133 5 Performance Anxiety: Illness and The History of Mary Prince......Page 162 Coda: Anatomy: We 'Other Hypochondriacs'......Page 183 Notes......Page 191 Bibliography......Page 204 C......Page 212 H......Page 213 O......Page 214 Y......Page 215 Machine generated contents note: Introduction: Interpreting Romantic Hypochondria Occupation Hazard: Thomas Beddoes and the "great dark threat" of Romantic Medicine Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Self-Anatomy of Coleridge's Aesthetics Phantom Memory: Nation and the Absent Body of Idealism in Mary Shelley's The Last Man Multiple Personality: De Quincey's Political Economies of Infirmity Performance Anxiety: Illness and The History of Mary Prince Coda Notes Bibliography. 'The Age of Hypochondria demonstrates sound scholarship, highly competent knowledge of its period, and a facile use of current theories of interpretation. Its choice of subject and authors treated will give it a distinct and original place among the roster of good books on Romantic medicine published in recent years.' -- Hermione de Almeida, Pauline Walter Chair in Comparative Literature, University of Tulsa, USA