Victorian Contagion

Victorian Contagion PDF Author: Chung-jen Chen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000691543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
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.

Victorian Contagion

Victorian Contagion PDF Author: Chung-jen Chen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000691543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London

Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London PDF Author: Matthew Newsom Kerr
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319657682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book is a history of London’s vast network of fever and smallpox hospitals, built by the Metropolitan Asylums Board between 1870 and 1900. Unprecedented in size and scope, this public infrastructure inaugurated a new technology of disease prevention—isolation. Londoners suffering from infectious diseases submitted themselves to far-reaching forms of surveillance, removal, and detention, which made them legible to science and the state in entirely new ways. Isolation on a mass scale transformed the meaning of urban epidemics and introduced contentious new relationships between health, citizenship, and the spaces of modern governance. Rich in archival sources and images, this engaging book offers innovative analysis at the intersection of preventive medicine and Victorian-era liberalism.

Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion

Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion PDF Author: Allan Conrad Christensen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134237332
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This intriguing book examines the ways contagion - or disease - inform and shape a wide variety of nineteenth century texts and contexts. Christiensen dissects the cultural assumptions concerning disease, health, impurity and so on before exploring different perspectives on key themes such as plague, nursing and the hospital environment and focusing on certain key texts including Dicken's Bleak House, Gaskell's Ruth, and Zola's Le Docteur Pascal.

Walking the Victorian Streets

Walking the Victorian Streets PDF Author: Deborah Epstein Nord
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Literary traditions of urban description in the nineteenth century revolve around the figure of the stroller, a man who navigates and observes the city streets with impunity. Whether the stroller appears as fictional character, literary persona, or the nameless, omnipresent narrator of panoramic fiction, he casts the woman of the streets in a distinctive role. She functions at times as a double for the walker's marginal and alienated self and at others as connector and contaminant, carrier of the literal and symbolic diseases of modern urban life. In Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Epstein Nord explores the way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering, poverty, and contagion in texts by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and Dickens. What, then, of the female walker and urban chronicler? While the male spectator enjoyed the ability to see without being seen, the female stroller struggled to transcend her role as urban spectacle and her association with sexual transgression. In novels, nonfiction, and poetry by Elizabeth Gaskell1 Flora Tristan, Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, Maud Pember Reeves, Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet, and others, Nord locates the tensions felt by the female spectator conscious of herself as both observer and observed. Finally, Walking the Victorian Streets considers the legacy of urban rambling and the uses of incognito in twentieth-century texts by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.

The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction

The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Nicky Losseff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317028066
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction seeks to address fundamental questions about the function, meaning and understanding of music in nineteenth-century culture and society, as mediated through works of fiction. The eleven essays here, written by musicologists and literary scholars, range over a wide selection of works by both canonical writers such as Austen, Benson, Carlyle, Collins, Gaskell, Gissing, Eliot, Hardy, du Maurier and Wilde, and less-well-known figures such as Gertrude Hudson and Elizabeth Sara Sheppard. Each essay explores different strategies for interpreting the idea of music in the Victorian novel. Some focus on the degree to which scenes involving music illuminate what music meant to the writer and contemporary performers and listeners, and signify musical tastes of the time and the reception of particular composers. Other essays in the volume examine aspects of gender, race, sexuality and class that are illuminated by the deployment of music by the novelist. Together with its companion volume, The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry edited by Phyllis Weliver (Ashgate, 2005), this collection suggests a new network of methodologies for the continuing cultural and social investigation of nineteenth-century music as reflected in that period's literary output.

Victorian Urban Settings

Victorian Urban Settings PDF Author: Debra N. Mancoff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136516727
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Serial Revolutions 1848

Serial Revolutions 1848 PDF Author: Clare Pettitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198830416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Shows how a series of revolutions that erupted across Europe in the mid to late 1840s were crucial to the creation of modern ideas of constitutional democracy, citizenship, and human rights.

Kept from All Contagion

Kept from All Contagion PDF Author: Kari Nixon
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143847850X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Kept from All Contagion explores the surprising social effects of germ theory in the late nineteenth century. Connecting groups of authors rarely studied in tandem by highlighting their shared interest in changing interpersonal relationships in the wake of germ theory, this book takes a surprising and refreshing stance on studies in medicine and literature. Each chapter focuses on a different disease, discussing the different social policies or dilemmas that arose from new understandings in the 1860s–1890s that these diseases were contagious. The chapters pair these sociohistorical considerations with robust literary analyses that assess the ways authors as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, among others, grappled with these ideas and their various impacts upon different human relationships—marital, filial, and social. Through the trifocal structure of each chapter (microbial, relational, and sociopolitical), the book excavates previously overlooked connections between literary texts that insist upon the life-giving importance of community engagement—the very thing that seemed threatening in the wake of germ theory's revelations. Germ theory seemed to promote self-protection via isolation; the authors covered in Kept from All Contagion resist such tacit biopolitical implications. Instead, as Kari Nixon shows, they repeatedly demonstrate vitalizing interpersonal interactions in spite of—and often because of—their contamination with disease, thus completely upending both the ways Victorians and present-day literary scholars have tended to portray and interpret purity.

Kept from All Contagion

Kept from All Contagion PDF Author: Kari Nixon
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438478496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Introduction: "The germ theory again" : disease, ideology, and the possibilities of biotic life in the world of antibiotic purity -- Keep bleeding : plague, vaccination debates, and the necessity of leaky boundaries in Defoe's Journal of the plague year and Shelley's The last man -- "A speculative idea" : childbed fever, early germ theory debates, and (en)gendered speculation in Henry James's Washington Square -- Separation and suffocation : tuberculosis, etiological uncertainty, and female friendship in women's fiction -- Tainted love : venereal disease, morality, and the contagious disease acts in Ibsen's Ghosts and Hardy's The woodlanders and Jude the obscure -- Humanity's waste : typhoid fever, the failure of isolation, and the development of probiotics in three late-century works -- Conclusion: Shuffling within our mortal coil : concluding remarks.

Endemic

Endemic PDF Author: Kari Nixon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137521414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book develops a new multimodal theoretical model of contagion for interdisciplinary scholars, featuring contributions from influential scholars spanning the fields of medical humanities, philosophy, political science, media studies, technoculture, literature, and bioethics. Exploring the nexus of contagion's metaphorical and material aspects, this volume contends that contagiousness in its digital, metaphorical, and biological forms is a pervasively endemic condition in our contemporary moment. The chapters explore both endemicity itself and how epidemic discourse has become endemic to processes of social construction. Designed to simultaneously prime those new to the discourse of humanistic perspectives of contagion, complicate issues of interest to seasoned scholars of science and technology studies, and add new topics for debate and inquiry in the field of bioethics, Endemic will be of wide interest for researchers and educators.