The social life of fluids : blood, milk, and water in the Victorian novel / Jules Law.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Law, Jules David, 1957-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Criticism and interpretation.

Dickens, Charles.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880--Criticism and interpretation.

Eliot, George.

Moore, George, 1852-1933--Criticism and interpretation.

Moore, George.

Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912. Dracula.

Stoker, Bram.

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Body fluids in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (216 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

British Victorians were obsessed with fluids-with their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. In The Social Life of Fluids Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel. Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids-blood, breast milk, and water-in six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830's through the 1890's. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates.

Contents:

Introduction : dark ecologies : A tale of two cities and "The cow with the iron tail"

Disavowing milk : psychic disintegration and domestic reintegration in Dickens's Dombey and son

A river runs through him : Our mutual friend and the embankment of the Thames

Perilous reversals : fluid exchange in George Eliot's early works

Merging with others : destiny and flow in Daniel Deronda

Tempted by the milk of another : the fantasy of limited circulation in Esther Waters

Ever-widening circulations : Dracula and the fear of management.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-8014-6238-X

OCLC:

732957111