Consumption and Literature

the long version

This fasincating new book seeks to explain an important and unanswered question: how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be the glamorous and artistic Romantic malady. It argues that literary works (cultural media) are not secondary in our perceptions of disease, but are among the primary determinants of physical experience. In order to explain the apparent disparity between literary myth and bodily reality, Lawlor examines literature and medicine from the Renaissance to the late Victorian period, and covers a wide range of authors and characters, major and minor, British and American (Shakespeare, Sterne, Mary Tighe, Keats, Amelia Opie).