Victorian Contagion

Chung-jen Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from National Taiwan Normal University (2009). He was a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) at Harvard University (2017-18). He was the recipient of the Award for Innovative Research for Young Scholars from the Foundation for the Advancement of Outstanding Scholarship (2015) and the Golden Tripod Award of Taiwan (2014) for his book in Mandarin, Empire, Medicine and 19th-Century English Literature. His research interests include nineteenth-century British novels, contemporary British fiction, and interdisciplinary studies in medicine and literature.

Introduction





Theorizing Contagion: The Uses of Contagion in Victorian England







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







"All Smell is Disease": Medical Realism in Charles Dickens’s Narratives of Sanitation







Serial Outbreaks: Florence Nightingale and the Narrative Practice of Nursing







From Imagined Community to Imagined Immunity: Medical Realism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Novels







Aesthetics of Sanitation and Social Practice in Dickens’s Novels: Prostitution and Moral Politics of Contagions







"A Clean City is a Healthy City": Normativity and Contagions in Victorian Slum Narratives







Victorian Materials and Rubbish Theory: Charles Dickens and the Recycling of Society in Our Mutual Friend







Conclusion