Department of English

In this course, we’ll read a number of primary texts from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies in which writers think about bodies and their disorders. In reading how people in the past represented bodies, you will find the familiar and the foreign. What we call “pregnancy” might instead be called “stirring.” People measured pulses not only by counting but by listening for “murmurs.” Symptoms were recorded in a poem rather than a patient chart.

The gap between their language and ours raises the questions: what are the difficulties of communicating physical experience in writing? How does reading the body change across time and place? How do we care and heal those whose pain we do not fully understand? How do we even know our own bodies from place to place? Writers in the long eighteenth century asked themselves similar questions when trying to know, express, or transform bodies and minds. Writers, philosophers, and scientists of this period undertook the project of theorizing and describing sensory experience — which in turn shaped literary representations of bodily feelings and sensations. Many of these same writers engaged in global trade and travel, encountering different ways of conceptualizing health and embodiment, which at once influenced and challenged their theories and their literary representations. We will read individual writers’ depictions of bodily change and the larger discourse of the period around wellness to understand their (and our own) assumptions about health and illness, pain and healing. Authors include Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Hans Sloane, Samson Occom, Mary Rowlandson, Mary Wollstonecraft, among others. Assignments include informal writings, a short research presentation/project, and a final paper. Non-majors are welcome, and no prior knowledge is required.