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Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel Maureen Tuthill

Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel By Maureen Tuthill

Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel by Maureen Tuthill


Summary

This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic.

Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel Summary

Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel: Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine by Maureen Tuthill

This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the glow of health tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America's first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.

Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel Reviews

Maureen Tuthill's fascinating book demonstrates how American assumptions about healthcare have their roots in the eighteenth century and, in particular, the two decades following the USA's founding. ... Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel is deeply researched, tightly structured and consistently well argued. ... The book makes thought-provoking and sobering reading ... . (Rowland Hughes, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, November, 2017)

About Maureen Tuthill

Maureen Tuthill is Associate Professor of English and A.P. Green Endowed Fellow in English at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, USA. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Literature of the Early American Republic, and Early American Literature.

Table of Contents

Preface.- Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- 1. A Very Unfeeling World: The Failure of Social Healing in Rowson's America.- 2. Your Health and My Happiness: Sickness and Health in The Coquette and Female Quixotism.- 3. The Best Means of Retaining Health: Self-determined Health and Social Discipline in Early America.- 4. The Means of Subsistence: Health, Wealth, and Social Affection in a Yellow Fever World.- 5. The Learned Doctor: Tyler's Literary Endorsement of a Federalist Elite.- 6. Some Yankee Non-sense about Humanity: Hiding Away African Health in Early American Fiction.- Epilogue.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.-

Additional information

NLS9781349955671
9781349955671
1349955671
Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel: Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine by Maureen Tuthill
New
Paperback
Palgrave Macmillan
2018-06-15
253
N/A
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