This book focuses on Ireland's lived experience of tuberculosis as represented in the nation's fiction; not surprisingly, the disease both manifests and conceals itself with devastating frequency in literature as it did in life. It seeks to place the history of tuberculosis in Ireland, from 1800 until after its virtual eradication in the mid-Twentieth Century, in conversation with fictional representations or repressions of a condition so fearsome that until very recently it was usually referred to by code words and euphemisms rather than by its name.

Focuses on Ireland's experience of TB as represented in the nation's fiction The first book-length study to interrogate the representation of TB in Irish fiction over two centuries Enables readers to approach fictional representations of TB in their historical context

Autorentext

Rachael Sealy Lynch, Associate Professor Emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, USA, works primarily in the field of recent and contemporary Irish women writers, and, more recently, in the medical humanities. She has published widely, with a focus on sex, stigma, and shame, on writers including Anne Enright, Jennifer Johnston, Molly Keane, Edna O'Brien, Emma Donoghue, Mary Lavin, and Liam O'Flaherty.

Inhalt

1 The Story of Tuberculosis in Ireland: An Overview.-2 The Nameless Scourge: Tuberculosis in Ireland, 1800the Present.-3 The Unspoken Menace.- 4 Dracula, Ireland's Vampiric Vector.- 5 The Lingering and The Dead: Illusion and Irony in Early Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction.- 6 Contagion and Community in Irish Fiction 19001942.- 7 Naming the Scourge and the Sanatorium of the Imagination