Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.

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).

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.

Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.