This collection examines different aspects of attitudes towards disease and death in writing of the long eighteenth century. Taking three conditions as examples – ennui, sexual diseases and infectious diseases – as well as death itself, contributors explore the ways in which writing of the period placed them within a borderland between fashionability and unfashionability, relating them to current social fashions and trends.

These essays also look at ways in which diseases were fashioned into bearing cultural, moral, religious and even political meaning. Works of literature are used as evidence, but also medical writings, personal correspondence and diaries. Diseases or conditions subject to scrutiny include syphilis, male impotence, plague, smallpox and consumption. Death, finally, is looked at both in terms of writers constructing meanings within death and of the fashioning of posthumous reputation.

Introduction: Fashioning the Unfashionable; Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall Dickson.- PART I: ENNUI.- 1. ‘[F]ictitious [D]istress’ or Veritable Woe?: The Problem of Eighteenth-Century Ennui; Heather Meek.- 2. ‘What is fashionably termed ennui’: Maria Edgeworth Represents the Clinically Bored; Jane Taylor.- PART II: DISEASE OF SEXUALITY.- 3. Dean Swift on the Great Pox: or, The Satirist as Physician; Hermann J. Real.- 4. The à la Mode Disease: Syphilis and Temporality; Emily Cock.- 5. Of Fribblers and Fumblers: Fashioning Male Impotence in the Long Eighteenth Century; Kirsten Juhas.- PART III: INFECTIOUS DISEASES.- 6. Fashioning Unfashionable Plague: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Hélène Dachez.- 7. How Small is Small? Small Pox, Large Presence; Allan Ingram.- 8. ‘Halfe Dead: and rotten at the Coare: my Lord!’: Fashionable and Unfashionable Consumption, from Early Modern to Enlightenment; Clark Lawlor.- PART IV: FASHIONING DEATH.- 9. Death by Inoculation: The Fashioning of Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Smallpox Pamphlets; Kelly McGuire.- 10. Fashion Victim: Suicide, Sociability and High Society in Georgiana Cavendish’s The Sylph; Leigh Wetherall Dickson.- 11. ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’: Jonathan Swift, Madness, and Fashionable Science; Helen Deutsch.- Bibliography.- Index.-