{"title":"Plague, Paradox, and the Ends of Community: Defoe's Epidemiological Orientalism","authors":"A. Camoglu","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a900660","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Revisiting Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) in tandem with a selection of medical sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this essay examines the ethnocultural underpinnings of plague. Although plague approximates community to its imagined outsiders through a shared sense of precarity, the divide between the two paradoxically stays intact. This paradox is amplified in the recurrent use of the orientalist trope of \"Turkish predestinarianism\" in Defoe's novel and medical texts contemporaneous with it. The epidemiological orientalism encapsulated in this notion, this essay argues, is animated by paradoxes that have the figurative effect of holding Londoners together in their isolation by distancing them from the ethnocultural other.","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a900660","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:Revisiting Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) in tandem with a selection of medical sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this essay examines the ethnocultural underpinnings of plague. Although plague approximates community to its imagined outsiders through a shared sense of precarity, the divide between the two paradoxically stays intact. This paradox is amplified in the recurrent use of the orientalist trope of "Turkish predestinarianism" in Defoe's novel and medical texts contemporaneous with it. The epidemiological orientalism encapsulated in this notion, this essay argues, is animated by paradoxes that have the figurative effect of holding Londoners together in their isolation by distancing them from the ethnocultural other.
期刊介绍：
As the official publication of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Eighteenth-Century Studies is committed to publishing the best of current writing on all aspects of eighteenth-century culture. The journal selects essays that employ different modes of analysis and disciplinary discourses to explore how recent historiographical, critical, and theoretical ideas have engaged scholars concerned with the eighteenth century.
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