Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print by Annika Mann

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print by Annika Mann Travis Chi Wing Lau MANN, ANNIKA. Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018. $45.00 hardcover. xi + 257 pp. In the face of a current global pandemic, Annika Mann's Reading Contagion offers a timely historical intervention into long-standing scholarly debates about contagion as a bodily phenomenon and concept metaphor. Rather than "collapsing contagion 'as a figure' and contagion as a 'real disease'" (7), Mann turns instead to New Materialist approaches, which reframe contagion in terms of how it exposes the interconnections between human and non-human actors and the precarious networks [End Page 217] of exchange that they share. Mann also complicates the more presentist, often ahistorical quality of New Materialist narratives about the politics of animate matter by recovering the eighteenth century as a cultural moment when contagious discourses were being radically renegotiated. The typical consignment of the eighteenth century to a "noticeably static, and often negative, position" (8) has enabled theorists to flatten the Enlightenment to a period of increasing medicalization and pathology that culminates in the statewide public health programs and sanitation projects of the nineteenth century. Yet, for Mann, eighteenth-century theories of contagion complicated any easy distinctions between "human bodies and nonhuman media and objects, as well as between diseased and healthy bodies and spaces" (11). One of the central theories of contagion in this period is what Mann terms "reading contagion" or the capacity for the act of reading to "propagate embodied collectives and facilitate large-scale epidemics" through its affective and physiological effects on readers (12-13). Such capacity, Mann underscores, politicized reading in the eighteenth century. Mann joins other scholars of eighteenth-century literature and science like Tita Chico, Lucinda Cole, and Helen Thompson in arguing for the co-constitutive nature of medical and literary discourses on contagion. Recognizing that "interventions regarding health and disease were made equally by physicians, philosophers, and literary writers, who all argue that they possess particular access to the workings of the body and its surrounding world (in part because that body and its world are not fully known or made visible" (189-90), Mann decenters medical men in conventional histories of contagion by recuperating how literary writers shaped and propagated those very same theories. Through case studies of Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley, Mann traces how "reading contagion" both recognizes the dangers of reading as the potential for passionate readerly identification and understands that identification as potentially reformatory or curative. Though seemingly contradictory, this theory of reading—while recognizing all textual objects as potentially threatening—enabled writers to justify their own literary experiments as salves for or prophylactics against other more toxic forms of writing. The transformative potential of the literary was thus always bound up with its potentially unbounded contagiousness: communities of readers constituted by the "viral" transmission of ideas and the literal circulation of print media in a burgeoning literary marketplace. Reading Contagion is organized around the four keywords "infection," "inoculation," "propagation," and "extinction," each referring to the approach of a single author to theorize a form of "reading contagion." Mann's introductory chapter, "Reading Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Medicine," grounds her argument in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plague writings that get reworked through Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as transformative, novelistic contact with the passions and matter of other bodies. This ambivalence between reading as "transformational contact" and as risky exposure is echoed in the following chapter on Alexander Pope's Dunciad in Four Books (1743), which similarly imagines print culture as epidemic outbreak but does not absolve Pope's own work from such "toxic materialization" (50, 54). Tobias Smollett and William Blake, in the subsequent chapters, both attempt to contain and transform the contagious potential of proliferating print media: the former "inoculates" audiences by creating hybrid media forms like The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) and The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) that are less virulently infectious (and thus less harmful), while the latter embraced "reading contagion...