Victorian Contagion

Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination

Chung-jen Chen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367360641
• eBook ISBN: 9781000691542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination examines the literary and cultural production of contagion in the Victorian era and the way that production participated in a moral economy of surveillance and control. In this book, I attempt to make sense of how the discursive practice of contagion governed the interactions and correlations between medical science, literary creation, and cultural imagination. Victorians dealt with the menace of contagion by theorizing a working motto in claiming the goodness and godliness in cleanliness which was theorized, realized, and radicalized both through practice and imagination. The Victorian discourse around cleanliness and contagion, including all its treatments and preventions, developed into a culture of medicalization, a perception of surveillance, a politics of health, an economy of morality, and a way of thinking. This book is an attempt to understands the literary and cultural elements which contributed to fear and anticipation of contagion, and to explain why and how these elements still matter to us today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination
• 1 Theorizing Contagion: The Uses of Contagion in Victorian England
• 2 Verbalizing Contagion: Edwin Chadwick’s Narratives and the Rise of Public Health Governance
• 3 “All Smell is Disease”: Medical Realism in Charles Dickens’s Narratives of Sanitation
• 4 Serial Outbreaks: Florence Nightingale and the Narrative Practice of Nursing
• 5 From Imagined Community to Imagined Immunity: Medical Realism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Novels
• 6 “On the Mode of Communication”: John Snow, Cholera, and Victorian Visualization of Contagions
• 7 Aesthetics of Sanitation and Social Practice in Dickens’s Novels: Prostitution and Moral Politics of Contagions
• 8 “A Clean City is a Healthy City”: Normativity and Contagions in Victorian Slum Narratives
• 9 Victorian Materials and Rubbish Theory: Charles Dickens and the Recycling of Society in Our Mutual Friend
• 10 Conclusion
• Index