Reading Contagion

Reading Contagion is a valuable work and will appeal to scholars of the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century literature, the history of medicine, and book history and print culture, as well as academic libraries selecting for these areas.... [the book] will add, too, to library historians' arsenal a more nuanced understanding of the concerns of the period's moralists and naturalphilosophy regarding the dangers of reading.

Reading Contagion proves an original, timely study grounded in the latest scholarship. As such, the book will appeal to anyone interested in affect, mediation, and medicine in the Enlightenment and beyond.

[L]ively and original.... Aligning an archive of medical histories with literary works, Mann establishes fresh readings of canonical texts.... The reader will come away from this book with a deeper understanding of authors and works discussed and of the larger cultural currents that helped produce them.

A well-written and energetic study of contagion as both metaphor and medico-descriptive term for writers in the long eighteenth century.

There is no better figure for the representation of the dangers and excitations of communal existence than contagion, a concept that blurs the distinction between material and metaphor and illustrates the perceived dangers of expanding literacy and print culture at a time of radical social and geopolitical transformation. For Annika Mann, an analysis of eighteenth-century theories of contagion demonstrates the intricate connections between scientific and cultural thought in this volatile period. Reading Contagion offers new insight into eighteenth-century science, medicine, and book culture, but perhaps the most exciting contribution stems from Mann's exploration of the connections among them. With this work, moreover, she shows the power of language to shape lived experience, including scientific inquiry, hence the importance of literary analysis to help us understand the worlds we make.