Telling Figures and Telling Feelings: The Geography of Emotions in the London of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Due Preparations for the Plague (1722)

Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year and its novelistic documentary counterpart Due Preparations for the Plague rely on contemporary statistics to enforce the sense of the emotional and psychological impact of the trauma of the plague. Relying on psychogeography and geocriticism this paper arg...

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Pubblicato in:URI:https://journals.openedition.org/1718,
Autore principale: Peraldo, Emmanuelle
Natura: Article ou chapitre numérique
Lingua:Anglais
Pubblicazione: XVII-XVIII 2016
Accesso online:Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
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Riassunto:Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year and its novelistic documentary counterpart Due Preparations for the Plague rely on contemporary statistics to enforce the sense of the emotional and psychological impact of the trauma of the plague. Relying on psychogeography and geocriticism this paper argues that Defoe creates a mental map of 1665 London with the statistics supplied by the Bills of Mortality and other contemporary documents. He uses facts, figures and documents for emotional and psychological effect. The theoretical approach of Defoe’s texts that this paper proposes considers them as a brand new territory for emotions, arguing that emotions can be analysed by paying attention to geographical space and spatial organisations and policies.