Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

by Annika Mann

Eighteenth-century British culture was transfixed by the threat of contagion, believing that everyday elements of the surrounding world could transmit deadly maladies from one body to the next. Physicians and medical writers warned of noxious matter circulating through air, bodily fluids, paper, and other materials, while philosophers worried that agitating passions could spread via certain kinds of writing and expression. Eighteenth-century poets and novelists thus had to grapple with the disturbing idea that literary texts might be doubly infectious, communicating dangerous passions and matter both in and on their contaminated pages.

In Reading Contagion, Annika Mann argues that the fear of infected books energized aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading, which could alter individual and social bodies by connecting people of all sorts in dangerous ways through print. Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, William Blake, and Mary Shelley ruminate on the potential of textual objects to absorb and transmit contagions with a combination of excitement and dread. This book vividly documents this cultural anxiety while explaining how writers at once reveled in the possibility that reading could transform the world while fearing its ability to infect and destroy.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

Published November 27, 2018

Reviews

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's some truly fascinating ideas in here - I was interested in the use of reading as a means of actual and metaphorical contagion in eighteenth and nineteenth century texts. There's a compelling sense of ambiguity in how medical knowledge and literary expression both reinforced and undermined each other, and I liked the idea of structuring the argument around five specific texts (five case study chapters, essentially).

I liked the idea. The presentation, not so much. These separate case studies often seemed to focus much more on the cultural background to each work than they did the work itself. In the final chapter, on Mary Shelley's The Last Man, for instance, Mann appeared far more interested in Percy Shelley's perception of the poetic, to the point where it felt as if his wife's actual novel barely got a look in. I could ascribe that to slightly misleading chapter titles, though, which raised expectations in me that the chapters themselves did not always fulfill: I was expecting close readings, and instead got a far more circular approach. That in itself is a fairly small quibble. Far more irritating was the prose, which frequently exhibited the worst of academic writing. This is especially annoying as there are times - the discussion of the Great Book Scare in the Afterword, for instance - where Mann is extremely lucid, so clearly it's not a lack of ability. Compare the writing there to the glutinous prose in (again) the section on Percy Shelley and the difference is marked. I might have given the book four stars were it not so consistently turgid, but turgid it was.

[Philip Athans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Contagion is a fascinating, richly conceived, and thoroughly researched look at the connection between the book as a physical object, the contents of the book as a "viral" mechanism for the spread of new ideas, and plague culture as it dramatically progressed from the 18th through the 19th centuries. Highly recommended.