Anonymous connections : the body and narratives of the social in Victorian Britain / Tina Young Choi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Choi, Tina Young.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Urbanization--Social aspects--Great Britain.

Urbanization.

Group identity--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Group identity.

Social participation--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Social participation.

History.

Urbanization--Social aspects.

Great Britain--Social conditions--19th century.

Great Britain.

Social conditions.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor [Michigan] : University of Michigan Press, [2015]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Anonymous Connections asks how the Victorians understood the ethical, epistemological, and biological implications of social belonging and participation. Specifically, Tina Choi considers the ways nineteenth-century journalists, novelists, medical writers, and social reformers took advantage of spatial frames-of-reference in a social landscape transforming due to intense urbanization and expansion. New modes of transportation, shifting urban demographics, and the threat of epidemics emerged during this period as anonymous and involuntary forms of contact between unseen multitudes. While previous work on the early Victorian social body have tended to describe the nineteenth-century social sphere in static political and class terms, Choi's work charts new critical terrain, redirecting attention to the productive-and unpredictable-spaces between individual bodies as well as to the new narrative forms that emerged to represent them. Anonymous Connections makes a significant contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century literature and British cultural and medical history while offering a timely examination of the historical forebears to modern concerns about the cultural and political impact of globalization.

Contents:

Introduction

1. At risk : statistical participation and the Victorian city

2. Miasmatic texts : the body's excesses and effects

3. Contagious narratives : distant causality and the emergence of multiplot

4. Radical solutions, conservative systems : narratives of circulation and closure

5. Recollections of the body : anatomical science and fictions of wholeness

6. Visions global and microbial : germ theory and empire

Conclusion.

Notes:

Issued as part of UPCC book collections on Project MUSE.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-174) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472121533

0472121537

9780472119721

0472119729

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.8296857

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.