Sleep and stress management in Enlightenment literature and poetry.

'Sleep and stress management in Enlightenment literature and poetry' argues that the relationship between sleep and stress, as we now call it, was well known in long eighteenth-century Britain. This period was one of changing theories about the nature of the body and mind due to the shift from received wisdom and religious dogma to modern experimental science, although there were some continuities with older ideas about regimen from classical medicine. The stresses known to disrupt sleep were often associated with unhealthy lifestyles and pressures of fashionable people of the upper classes, with the lower orders thought to be less susceptible to broken sleep because of their healthier modes of living (less sedentary, less corrupted by rich food and drink, earlier sleeping times more connected with natural rhythms).

"The History of Half the Sex": Fashionable Disease, Capitalism, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century.

This essay examines the way in which disease was framed and narrated as fashionable in the long eighteenth century, and argues that the intensifying focus on women's fashionable disorders in the period grew in tandem with the rise of an unstable capitalism in its manifold forms. Using the satirical articles written by Henry Southern in the London Magazine-"On Fashions" (August 1825), "On Fashions in Physic" (October 1825), and "On Dilettante Physic" (January 1826)-and the literature that led to them, I analyze the role that women were now taking in the newly capitalized world of the early nineteenth century. This world was characterized by a burgeoning medical market, a periodical and print market which could adequately reflect and promote fashionable diseases and the medical market that spawned them, and the nexus of actors in the whole drama of the production, maintenance, and dissolution of fashionable diseases.

'Long grief, dark melancholy, hopeless natural love': Clarissa, Cheyne and narratives of body and soul.

The paper deals with Clarissa's wasting combination of love and religious melancholy, and the way in which ailments of the mind have an immediate effect on the body in this period. George Cheyne's theories of melancholy and hypochondria explain at least some of the mechanisms by which the eighteenth century understood this phenomenon. 'Clarissa' is an important text because it influenced so many later representations of melancholy, especially as it is gendered feminine in Richardson's newly feminised discourse of sensibility.