Gothic Plague: Defoe, Petrarch and Curiosity

Abstract This article is dedicated to the Journal of the Plague Year , in which Daniel Defoe dealt with the so-called Great Plague of London in 1665. At the centre of the analysis are the constitutive and innovative potentials of plague for literary-aesthetic discourse. These poetological potentials, according to the thesis put forward here, manifest themselves in that the epidemic, in its form decidedly horrified by Defoe, locates the Journal on the threshold of intellectual and literary history between the Enlightenment and Gothic fiction. In addition to a ‘Gothic’ word field, episodes about delirious and zombie-like wandering plague sufferers and the metaphorical superimposition of the plague with neurological diseases laden with relevant associations, the Journal ’s Gothic affinity is evident in the macabre curiosity of the narrator H. F. This curiosity is to be profiled through a comparison with another scene of curiosity that is revolutionary in terms of intellectual and literary history, namely Petrarch’s De ascensu montis Ventosi ( Ascent of Mont Ventoux ).