Main description:

This book seeks to explain how consumption - a horrible disease - came to be the glamorous and artistic Romantic malady. It tries to explain the disparity between literary myth and bodily reality, by examining literature and medicine from the Renaissance to the late Victorian period, covering a wide range of authors and characters.

Contents:

Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: RENAISSANCE Consumption and Love Melancholy: The Renaissance Tradition The 'Golden Disease': Early Modern Religious Consumptions PART II: ENLIGHTENMENT 'The genteel, linear, consumptive make': the Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental 'A consuming malady and a consuming mistress': Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility PART III: ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN Wasting Poets 'Seeming delicately slim': Consumed and Consuming Women Meeting Keats in Heaven: David Gray and the Romantic Legacy Conclusion: Germ Theory and After Bibliography Index