This essay argues that the emotional rhetoric of today’s breast cancer discourse—with its emphasis on stoicism and ‘positive thinking’ in the cancer patient, and its use of sympathetic feeling to encourage charitable giving—has its roots in the long 18th century. While cancer had long been connected with the emotions, 18th-century literature saw it associated with both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feelings, and metaphors describing jealousy, love and other sentiments as ‘like a cancer’ were used to highlight the danger of allowing feelings—even benevolent or pleasurable feelings—to flourish unchecked. As the century wore on, breast cancer in particular became an important literary device for exploring the dangers of feeling in women, with writers of both moralising treatises and sentimental novels connecting the growth or development of cancer with the indulgence of feeling, and portraying emotional self-control as the only possible form of resistance against the disease. If, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests, today’s discourse of ‘positive thinking’ has been mobilised to make patients with breast cancer more accepting of their diagnosis and more cooperative with punitive treatment regimens, then 18th-century fictional exhortations to stay cheerful served similarly conservative political and economic purposes, encouraging continued female submission to male prerogatives inside and outside the household.

This essay explores the changing cultural meanings of the comparison between satire and medicine in literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century (1660–1800). Drawing on examples from a wide range of texts, I argue that medical rhetoric not only remained important in the theorization and classification of satire as a genre, but also played a prominent role within satiric literature, as writers began to complicate and challenge the conventional critical associations between satirists and physicians. Ultimately, I suggest that the satire-as-medicine metaphor came to stand in for a number of important cultural debates, including those between the arts and sciences, between “high” and “low” art, and between the ancients and moderns.

In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. This book explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art. As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. The book highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection's symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.

While many critics read Joseph Andrews as a response to Samuel Richardson's Pamela , this essay argues that Henry Fielding's "comic Epic-Poem in Prose" is as deeply concerned with the current state of historiography as it is with the development of the novel. Just as Fielding's narrator ridicules the prevailing vogue for intimate, detailed fiction over grand epic narrative, so he attacks the shift from a neoclassical style of historical writing to a modern style focused on the histories of ordinary men and individual private lives.

This essay argues that many Restoration and eighteenth-century satires and panegyrics were intended and received as interventions in a tradition of English historical writing. Using the advice-to-a-painter poems of Edmund Waller and Andrew Marvell as my chief examples, I suggest that the partiality derogatorily ascribed to satire and panegyric by Restoration historians not only enabled satirists and panegyrists to adopt a biased political stance; it also facilitated a narrowing of formal perspective—partiality in the sense of partialness—that allowed for the development of more detailed forms of historical representation.