Cover-Page -- Half-Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Due Preparations -- 1 Contagious Metaphor -- Contagion as metaphor -- Metaphor as contagion -- Aristotle's theory of metaphor -- Metaphor as 'lie' in the empirical tradition: Hobbes and Locke -- Metaphor reconsidered: Vico, Rousseau and Nietzsche -- Interactional and cognitive approaches to metaphor: Richards and Black -- Lakoff and Johnson's 'conceptual metaphor theory' -- Nietzsche 'rediscovered': Metaphor, mimetic contagion and the linguistic turn in Continental philosophy -- 2 Pestilence and Poison Winds: Literary Contagions and the Endurance of Miasma Theory -- The forgetting of air -- Miasma and contagion from the Hippocratic scholars to germ theory -- Plague narratives, the troping of air and wind, and Daniel Defoe's Due Preparations for the Plague -- Pestilence and poison winds: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice -- Communicative contagion: Albert Camus's The Plague -- An aerography of contagion: Janette Turner Hospital's Due Preparations for the Plague -- 3 The French fin de siècle and the Birth of Social Contagion Theory -- Social contagion at the fin de siècle: Le Bon, Tarde and Sighele -- Le Bon, the contagious crowd and the popularization of crowd psychology -- Tarde, imitation and the contagion of example -- Sighele and the nineteenth-century pre-history of social contagion theory -- An eighteenth-century precursor: Philippe Hecquet and the concept of 'moral contagion' -- From moral contagion to the 'contagion of example' -- 4 The Contagion of Example -- Erasmus, the Adages and 'contagio morum' -- By generation or imitation: Pelagius, Augustine and the fifth-century debate over 'contagious sin' -- Contagiosa res: Augustine and the pears -- The debate replayed: Erasmus and Calvin on Rom. 5:12.

The 'contagion of example' in early modern discourse -- From 'moral' to 'mental' contagion -- 5 Infectious Ideas: Richard Dawkins, Meme Theory and the Politics of Metaphor -- Selfish genes, selfish memes -- Memes, genes and critiques of The Selfish Gene -- The Lamarckian meme -- The contagious meme -- Memes and metaphors -- 6 Networks of Contagion -- Contagion and the 'network society': The rise of 'network epidemiology' -- Intersecting networks of contagion in Soderbergh's Contagion -- Epidemiologies of the network: Contagion and network theory from tarde to financial contagion and viral network theory -- Financial contagion: Between models and metaphors -- Digital contagion and 'viral' network theory -- Coda: Language is a virus -- Notes -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Bibliography -- Index.