Nixon Kept from All Contagion

Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4384-7850-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 274 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nixon, Kari

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: "The Germ Theory Again": Disease, Ideology, and the Possibilities of Biotic Life in the World of Antibiotic Purity

1. 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

2. "A Speculative Idea": Childbed Fever, Early Germ Theory Debates, and (En)gendered Speculation in Henry James's Washington Square

3. Separation and Suffocation: Tuberculosis, Etiological Uncertainty, and Female Friendship in Women's Fiction

4. Tainted Love: Venereal Disease, Morality, and the Contagious Disease Acts in Ibsen's Ghosts and Hardy's The Woodlanders and Jude the Obscure

5. 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

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Kari Nixon is Assistant Professor of Literature at Whitworth University and the coeditor (with Lorenzo Servitje) of Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory.