{"product_id":"pestilence-and-the-body-politic-hunter-h-gardner-9780198796428","title":"Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature","description":"Scientists, journalists, novelists, and filmmakers continue to generate narratives of contagious disease, stories shaped by a tradition of disease discourse that extends to early Greco-Roman literature. Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman \u003cem\u003eres publica\u003c\/em\u003e in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE-14 CE): relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eTheorists such as Susan Sontag and Rene Girard have observed how the rhetoric of disease frequently signals social, psychological, or political pathologies, but their observations have rarely been applied to Latin literary practices. \u003cem\u003ePestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature\u003c\/em\u003e explores how the origins and spread of outbreaks described by Roman writers enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective, staged in an environment signalling both reversion to a pre-historic Golden Age and the devastation characteristic of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Such innovations in Latin literature have impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola's paintings of a seventeenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples and Margaret Atwood's \u003cem\u003eMaddaddam\u003c\/em\u003e Trilogy. Understanding why Latin writers developed these tropes for articulating contagious disease and imbuing it with meaning for the collapse of the Roman body politic allows us to clarify what more recent disease discourses mean both for their creators and for the populations they afflict in contemporary media.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Hunter H. Gardner\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0198796420\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780198796428\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Oxford University Press, USA\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/11\/2019\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 316\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.20lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.60h x 5.70w x 1.00d","brand":"Hunter H. Gardner","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":44119429185791,"sku":"9780198796428","price":115.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_5cd0af8c-ebb7-4074-9f24-26cf57920037.jpg?v=1687409297","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/pestilence-and-the-body-politic-hunter-h-gardner-9780198796428","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}