Abstract
This chapter studies three different stages of the literary imagination of cholera. It starts by considering the cultural shock caused by the first two cholera pandemics and weighs how that influenced apocalyptic discourses in literature (1826 to the 1860s). Then, it discusses the opposite tendency of denial which is linked to comic texts produced in the 1830s. Finally, it analyzes how these trends were transformed after the remarkable advances in bacteriology from the 1880s onward. By confronting these three facets of cholera’s representation, it is possible to identify its influence over the literature of the early twentieth century.
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Notes
- 1.
Hays (2005).
- 2.
Hamlin (2009).
- 3.
Harrison (2020).
- 4.
Jameson (1820), p. 13.
- 5.
Guerios (2021), p. 100; Hays, Epidemics and pandemics, 229–331.
- 6.
Smith (1824), p. 119.
- 7.
My emphasis. Smith (1831), p. 9.
- 8.
Arnold (1993), pp. 161–163.
- 9.
Inklaar et al. (2018).
- 10.
de Jonnès (1831), p. 78.
- 11.
Morris (1976), p. 14.
- 12.
Broussais (1832), p. 2.
- 13.
My translation. Sue (1844), p. 145.
- 14.
Leon Gozlan, “Cholera morbus,” L’Artiste 1 (1831): 53–56. Cited in Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Blemished physiologies: Delacroix, Paganini, and the cholera epidemic of 1832,” The Art Bulletin 83.4 (2001): 694 and 708.
- 15.
Some famous examples are: the anonymous frescoIl Trionfo della Morte (c. 1446) kept at Palazzo Abatellis, in Palermo;Il Trionfo della Morte e la Danza Macabra (1485) by Giacomo Borlone at the external facade of the Oratorio dei Disciplini in Clusone, Italy; or the The Triumph of Death (c. 1562) by Pieter Bruegel, currently at the Museo del Prado, inMadrid.
- 16.
My translation. Flaubert (1910), pp. 109–114.
- 17.
Dostoyevsky (1917), pp. 555–56.
- 18.
Sontag (1990), pp. 137–38.
- 19.
To mention only a few: the anonymous coloured lithograph John Bull between two humbugs(1831); the anonymous caricature Plagas de que pronto, á España—quiere ver libre La ARAÑA (1885) published in the Spanish magazine La Araña; the cartoon V’la le Choléra (1892) by Adolphe Willette presented by Arsène Alexandre in the anthology L’art du rire et de la caricature (1892).
- 20.
Bewell (2003), pp. 205–242 and pp. 296–314.
- 21.
Stokes (1921), p. 131.
- 22.
Guerios (2020), pp. 115–130.
- 23.
Poe (1850), p. 339.
- 24.
Smith, A discourse on the epidemic, 13.
- 25.
Poe, Red Death, 339.
- 26.
Poe, Red Death, 345.
- 27.
Heine (1893), p. 182.
- 28.
My translation. De Sterlich (1837), pp. 11–16.
- 29.
My translation. Foschi (1983), p. 182.
- 30.
My translation. Heinrich (1834), pp. 66–67.
- 31.
Heine, The Works, 167.
- 32.
Heine, The Works, 166–167.
- 33.
Chateaubriand (1900), p. 486.
- 34.
Hamlin, Cholera: the biography, 81–86.
- 35.
Jr Cohn (2017), p. 164.
- 36.
Manzoni (1843), p. 21.
- 37.
My translation. Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, “Er còllera mòribbus, Converzazzione a l’osteria de la ggènzola indisposta e ariccontata co ttrentaquattro sonetti, e tutti de grinza.” in Tutti i Sonetti Romaneschi (Roma: Newton, 1998), 841.
- 38.
My translation. Belli, “Er còllera mòribbus,” 844.
- 39.
My translation. Belli, “Er còllera mòribbus,” 851.
- 40.
My translation. Salgari (1973), p. 411
- 41.
My translation. Lasswitz (1902), pp. 28–29.
- 42.
Bruant (1889–1895), pp. 71–78.
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Guerios, A.L. (2022). Three Facets of the Literary Imagination of Cholera: Hysteria, Ridicule, and the Rise of Bacteriology. In: Venkatesan, S., Chatterjee, A., Lewis, A.D., Callender, B. (eds) Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1296-2_5
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