Advances in astronomy such as the theories of Copernicus and the development of the telescope sparked a strong response within Early Modern literature. The essays in this collection show this discourse went on to develop a political context to discuss topics like New World exploration and even kingship and regicide, well into the 18th century.

Through the transgressive works of prominent writers like Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nalo Hopkinson, Medicine and Ethics in Black Women's Speculative Fiction explores the fraught history of medicine as it relates to black women and the inconsistent application of medical ethics in today's world. As Jones argues, black female speculative authors connect representations of personal illness to much larger societal sicknesses, shedding light on the ethical issues on topics like militarized rape, children born of war, female circumcision, organ donation, mental illness, and disability....

This book examines Thomas De Quincey's notion of the unconscious in the light of modern cognitive science and nineteenth-century science. It challenges Freudian theories as the default methodology in order to understand De Quincey's oeuvre and the unconscious in literature more generally.

Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century investigates the impact of eugenic discourse on American literary production in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Analyzing the eugenic language of biological reform, racial improvement, and hereditarian social reconstruction, this book delineates the complex and often surprising ways that the conceptual assumptions of eugenics regarding reproduction, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity fundamentally shaped American literary imaginations. Through writers like Jack London,...

This book is open access under a CC-BY licence.

This book takes the first in-depth look at how people thought about, diagnosed and treated cancer in the early modern period, examining imaginative literature, medical texts and personal accounts.

This book is open access under a CC-BY licence.

This book takes the first in-depth look at how people thought about, diagnosed and treated cancer in the early modern period, examining imaginative literature, medical texts and personal accounts.

This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic.

This book examines a pivotal moment in the history of science and women's place in it. Meredith Ray offers the first in-depth study and complete English translation of the fascinating correspondence between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617), a natural philosopher and author of the epic poem, Scanderbeide (1623), and famed astronomer, Galileo Galilei. Their correspondence, undertaken soon after the publication of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius, reveals how Sarrocchi approached Galileo for his help revising her epic poem, offering, in return, her endorsement of his recent telescopic...

The book reassesses well-known literary and medical works by such authors as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Humphry Davy, argues for the importance of lesser-studied work by authors including Charles Lamb and Thomas Beddoes, and introduces significant unpublished work by Tom Wedgwood.