JOURNAL ARTICLE

Plague, Paradox, and the Ends of Community: Defoe's Epidemiological Orientalism.

  • Published In: Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023, v. 56, n. 4. P. 583 1 of 3

  • Database: Academic Search Ultimate 2 of 3

  • Authored By: Camoglu, Arif 3 of 3

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additional Information

  • Source:Eighteenth-Century Studies. 2023/07, Vol. 56, Issue 4, p583
  • Document Type:Article
  • Subject Area:Literature and Writing
  • Publication Date:2023
  • ISSN:0013-2586
  • DOI:10.1353/ecs.2023.a900660
  • Accession Number:164584208
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