Alan Bewell is an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.
Romanticism and Colonial Disease is an eloquent, powerful and major
contribution to a flourishing area of research, a recovery (in the
archival rather than the therapeutic sense) of an entire realm of
culture: for example the chapters on colonial military disease
narratives and John Ritchie's view of Africa. The eloquence of its
elegant middle style alone should attract readers. This book will
need to be on hand when anyone does work in its fields of
study.
—Timothy Morton, Romantic Circles Reviews
Bewell has rediscovered a vital dimension to our understanding of
the Romantic period. No scholar of the period should leave his book
unread.
—Neil Vickers, The Wordsworth Circle
Alan Bewell has written one of the most important and original
assessments of Romanticism to have appeared for many a long year.
Romanticism and Colonial Disease is new historicism at its best.
Packed with detailed and original research, it refocuses the
Romantic movement in a completely unexpected way, demanding that we
rethink the literature with which we thought we were familiar. But
it does more than this, it also changes our understanding of
British culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
and redefines our understanding of colonialism.
—Tim Fulford, Romanticism on the Net
Bewell offers romanticists a new orientation rich with exciting
possibilities. He opens the way to an understanding of colonialism
not as a uni-directional action but, instead, as a dark commonality
of dynamically reciprocal interactions within a process of
accelerating globalization.
—Karl Kroeber, Keats-Shelley Journal
Romanticism and Colonial Disease is certainly one of the most
significant works of Romantic criticism to appear in recent years.
It presents us with a more complex and interesting body of work,
and Bewell adds a new dimension to the colonial and historical
context of Romantic literature, demonstrating ideas and strategies
in Romantic writings that we simply have not hitherto noticed. This
is an authoritative and scholarly account of an aspect of colonial
history and literature that we will in future have to recognize in
our continuing understanding of the period and its writing.
—Peter J. Kitson, Nineteenth Century Literature
In this extraordinarily important, exhaustively documented book,
Alan Bewell for the first time tracks the emergence in Britain
between 1780 and 1848 of an understanding of the fundamental
conjunction of colonial expansion with epidemic disease, both in
the colonies themselves and, more anxiety-provoking, at home in
England . . . After reading Romanticism and Colonial Disease, we
will no longer be able to ignore the ways in which disease infected
both the bodies of numerous British Romantic writers—Bewell details
the actual diseases endured by Coleridge, Keats, Percy Shelley,
Thomas Medwin, Matthew Lewis, and a host of other writers during
the period—and, more significantly, the cultural imagination of the
Romantic period.
—Anne K. Mellor, Configurations
Bewell's book is an example of the best of interdisciplinary
scholarship, a treatise on the history of medicine, medical
geography, English literature, and colonial diseases. I recommend
it for a wide readership, and plan on using it in my own graduate
seminars. As evidenced most in the final pages, Bewell's book
should be applauded for its ultimately political statement on the
profoundly social causes of disease in the nineteenth century as
well as today.
—Susan Craddock, Historical Geography
Romanticism and Colonial Disease is a superb book and indispensable
to anyone seeking to understand either Romanticism or the medical
aspects of colonial expansion.
—Mark Harrison, Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Bewell's great achievement is to have shown us just how heavily
colonial disease weighted upon the social conditions and the
literary production of romantic period Britain. In accomplishing
that monumental task he has set a new standard of excellence for
the study of romanticism in the context of colonialism.
—Steven Goldsmith, Studies in Romanticism
This is an important and an exciting contribution to the growing
literature on colonialism and medicine.
—Social History of Medicine
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