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Book

Victorian Contagion

Book

Victorian Contagion

DOI link for Victorian Contagion

Victorian Contagion book

Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination

Victorian Contagion

DOI link for Victorian Contagion

Victorian Contagion book

Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination
ByChung-jen Chen
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2019
eBook Published 18 September 2019
Pub. Location New York
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429343643
Pages 332
eBook ISBN 9780429343643
Subjects Language & Literature
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Chen, C.-J. (2019). Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429343643

ABSTRACT

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

chapter |16 pages

Victorian Contagion

Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination

chapter 1|35 pages

Theorizing Contagion

The Uses of Contagion in Victorian England

chapter 2|36 pages

Verbalizing Contagion

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

chapter 3|31 pages

“All Smell is Disease”

Medical Realism in Charles Dickens’s Narratives of Sanitation

chapter 4|33 pages

Serial Outbreaks

Florence Nightingale and the Narrative Practice of Nursing

chapter 5|32 pages

From Imagined Community to Imagined Immunity

Medical Realism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Novels

chapter 6|42 pages

“On the Mode of Communication”

John Snow, Cholera, and Victorian Visualization of Contagions

chapter 7|30 pages

Aesthetics of Sanitation and Social Practice in Dickens’s Novels

Prostitution and Moral Politics of Contagions

chapter 8|26 pages

“A Clean City is a Healthy City”

Normativity and Contagions in Victorian Slum Narratives

chapter 9|26 pages

Victorian Materials and Rubbish Theory

Charles Dickens and the Recycling of Society in Our Mutual Friend

chapter 10|4 pages

Conclusion

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