Victorian Contagion

Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination

Chung-jen Chen (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

332 Seiten

2021
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-032-08993-5 (ISBN)

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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.

Chung-jen Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from National Taiwan Normal University (2009). He was a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) at Harvard University (2017-18). He was the recipient of the Award for Innovative Research for Young Scholars from the Foundation for the Advancement of Outstanding Scholarship (2015) and the Golden Tripod Award of Taiwan (2014) for his book in Mandarin, Empire, Medicine and 19th-Century English Literature. His research interests include nineteenth-century British novels, contemporary British fiction, and interdisciplinary studies in medicine and literature.

Introduction

Theorizing Contagion: The Uses of Contagion in Victorian England

Verbalizing Contagion: Edwin Chadwick’s Narratives and the Rise of Public Health Governance

"All Smell is Disease": Medical Realism in Charles Dickens’s Narratives of Sanitation

Serial Outbreaks: Florence Nightingale and the Narrative Practice of Nursing

From Imagined Community to Imagined Immunity: Medical Realism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Novels

Aesthetics of Sanitation and Social Practice in Dickens’s Novels: Prostitution and Moral Politics of Contagions

"A Clean City is a Healthy City": Normativity and Contagions in Victorian Slum Narratives

Victorian Materials and Rubbish Theory: Charles Dickens and the Recycling of Society in Our Mutual Friend

Conclusion

Erscheinungsdatum	01.07.2021
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	453 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-032-08993-8 / 1032089938
ISBN-13	978-1-032-08993-5 / 9781032089935
Zustand	Neuware