Is contagion a key to our scholarly understanding of the invisible power that printed books exert on readers in the long eighteenth century? Contagion is certainly a potent metaphor for the transmission of affect from object to person and vice versa. Medical practitioners of the period believed that, due to their porosity, pages could literarily transfer disease. It is the agency of the book as a material object that Georgian theories of contagion lay open. However, it is notoriously difficult to determine the boundaries between the literal and metaphorical, whether “contagion” is working as a concept or a trope in the medical literature of the time. Central to the problem is the relation of miasma (factors including air, climate, moral corruption) and contagion (spread by fomites, animalcules, seeds, or other particles), which has been the subject of extensive investigation in medical history.
In her monograph, Mann models long-held eighteenth-century theories...
