This considers the relationship between the elevation of the novel into moral respectability and the turn to anti-heroic discourse. The novels of Daniel Defoe (works influenced by rogue narratives) show little interest in representations of feminine virtue of the kind Richardson foregrounds in his influential Pamela. Where Defoe represents martial violence with relatively few reservations, in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, a concern with feminine virtue is accompanied by anti-heroic discourse which entails critical views of war. As novelists, Fielding and Smollett both represent the malign effects of modern war while, in Amelia, Fielding even represents a form of pacifist feeling. The chapter ends with discussion of the anonymous Ephraim Tristram Bates, in which a potentially excellent soldier is defeated by a corrupt system of military patronage, and of Sternes Tristram Shandy, in which martial virtue has become a matter of moral sentiment, destructive of domestic order.

This chapter addresses a topic – health – that has come to light in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Bringing together animal studies and the medical humanities, the chapter examines key texts from Leo Africanus, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, and others to trace close historical and discursive relationships between human and animal health. Focusing largely on diseases thought to be what we would now call zoonotic, or transferable from nonhuman animals to humans, the chapter seeks to make apparent the significance of cross-species infections that, before antibiotics and most vaccines, helped shape literature, trade, health, and imperial order. Although rabies provided the most recognizable model of cross-species infection, the chapter begins with locust swarms, which offered many Christian writers a model for articulating global connections between pests and pestilence, then turns to shipboard rats, which, even before germ theory, were thought by many early moderns to function as harbingers of death and disease. Having demonstrated how deeply cross-species contagion was entangled with theological definitions about what it is be human, the chapter ends by exploring a little known topic – early modern and eighteenth-century cattle plague – and its implications for reimagining a multispecies medical posthumanities.

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift tacitly drew his first readers’ attention to two forms of popular fiction: imaginary voyages in the manner of Lucian’s True History, and the pseudo-autobiographical fictitious travellers’ tales made familiar by The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ‘Written by Himself’. Contemporaries recognised the rhetorical similarities between the True History and Swift’s ironic manner, and there are clear plot resemblances. There is also evidence that contemporaries associated Gulliver’s Travels with the pseudo-autobiographical narratives made popular by Defoe, perhaps because Swift included the same sort of circumstantial autobiographical detail. Whether this makes Gulliver’s Travels a ‘parodying novel’ is an interesting question. It was routinely included in lists of novels in the century following its initial publication, which suggests that eighteenth-century readers had no difficulty appreciating that, if Gulliver’s Travels was not a novel, it was unquestionably working within a recognisable popular literary tradition.

5. This chapter focuses on Foes ending, a book designed to confront with the limits of the novel form. It explores in new detail the evolution of this work from Coetzees drafts.

6. Age of Iron is explored with relation to secularism, the psycho-social theories of Georges Bataille, angelhood, and the poetics of Rilke.

This essay surveys some of the most prominent metaphors used to characterize infectious diseases in eighteenth-century literature. These include military metaphors that portray the disease as the enemy; ‘othering’ metaphors that categorize infection as a foreign immigrant, import, or invader; and commercial metaphors that compare the circulation of a disease with the circulation of currency or commodities. Using Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year as a test case, I demonstrate that multiple disease metaphors often operate within a single text, creating a more nuanced and complex portrait of infection than we might otherwise expect in this period. Ultimately, I argue that disease metaphors in eighteenth-century literature are almost always complicated and equivocal, with writers like Defoe drawing attention to the social and ethical meanings of an epidemic, and not just its terrifying destructive force.

This chapter reassesses the role of the novel in producing an economy of scale within which to picture the eighteenth-century body, under colonial conditions. It suggests that the novel of the period is driven by two imperatives, at once to produce an expanded picture of the body at a remove from itself and to produce an opposite image of a bound, organically complete body, which is proof against the alienating effects of colonial distance. The chapter then goes on to explore the first of these two drives, as it is expressed in the novel from from Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe to Jonathan Swift and Sarah Scott.