Desire and Disorder

This is a richly contextualized study of a subject at the nexus of several current, scholarly concerns: colonialism, medical theory, sentimentalism, identity discourse, and fiction. Applying a variety of sources - medical, judicial, theoretical, and historical - to literary works, the book argues that the literary representations about fever formed an essential way to construct identity and that this identity carried political and ideological implications. Desire and Disorder offers a nuanced and sophisticated reading of a wealth of texts - both canonical and currently just beginning to be reread - that are key in literary and cultural history. Ward persistently observes the "troubling" as well as ordering aspects of the association of disease and identity, so that both the culture of Georgian England and the literary texts examined here emerge in a new light. It is an important, thoughtful study that shows how the previously under-regarded - indeed, largely ignored - discourse of health and disease underscores and underpins most of the fundamental structures and currents of eighteenth-century society.