Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, 1764-1834 - Slavery, Disease and Colonial Modernity

Significant study of colonial Caribbean literatures in the context of the high rates of disease and death in the region.

List of contents

Communicating disease: literature and medicine in the Atlantic World; Part I. Health, Geography and Aesthetics: 1. 'What new forms of death': the poetics of disease and cure; 2. The diagnostics of description: medical topography and the colonial picturesque; Part II. Colonial Bodies: 3. Skin, textuality and colonial feeling; 4. 'A Seasoned Creole' and 'a Citizen of the World': White West Indians and Atlantic medical knowledge; Part III. Revolution and Abolition: 5. The 'intimate union of medicine and magic': Obeah, revolution and colonial modernity; Afterword: colonial modernities and after abolition.

About the author

Emily Senior is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has had articles published in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Atlantic Studies.

Summary

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Caribbean was known as the 'grave of Europeans'. Drawing on a wide range of fictional and non-fictional accounts this book explores the cultural impact of such widespread disease, revealing how literature was crucial to the development and circulation of new medical ideas.

Product details

• Authors: Emily Senior, Emily (Birkbeck College Senior, SENIOR EMILY
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2018
• EAN: 9781108416818
• ISBN: 978-1-108-41681-8
• No. of pages: 300
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism; Cambridge Studies in Romantici; Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; Caribbean islands, History of Medicine, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Slavery & abolition of slavery, Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery