Candace Ward. Desire and disorder: fevers, fictions, and feeling in english georgian culture Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. 297 pp.

摘要

Eighteenth-century novels of sensibility almost invariably include an illness narrative, which establishes the hero or heroine either as a sufferer or as the sympathetic friend of one whose body has been disordered. Episodes of illness bring grief and tears to the sentimental novel in cases of loss, or relief and joy in instances of recovery. Investigations by critics in the last two decades have shed new light on the social significance of these illnesses by connecting them to the eighteenth-century interest in nerve theory, according to which either an excessively delicate sensibility or a desire to indulge the passions can lead to a ? fatal bodily disorder. Until now, however, there has been little discussion of the means through which desire becomes disorder in these novels-that is, of the specific febrile illnesses typically associated with desires rooted in poverty, love, ambition, imprisonment and slavery. By examining the medical literature of the period not with an eye toward nerve theory but rather toward the several types of fevers commonly described by both medical writers and novelists, Candace Ward supplies the link between desire and disorder, showing that accounts of illnesses were social documents that can be used to explain the ways that class, race, gender and ideology contribute to the disordering of the body.