Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination

This book examines the literary and cultural imaginary of contagion in the Victorian era and the way that imaginary participated in the production of a moral economy of surveillance and control. In this book, the author attempts to make sense of how the discursive practice of contagion governed the interactions between medical science, literary creation, and the public imagination. Victorians dealt with the menace of contagion by equating cleanliness with goodness—even godliness—in scientific theory, cultural production, and even everyday practice. The Victorian discourse around cleanliness and contagion, including all its treatments and preventions, developed into a culture of medicalization and surveillance, a politics of health, and an economy of morality. This book is an attempt to understand the literary and cultural elements which contributed to this discourse of contagion, and to explain why and how this discourse still matters to us today.