Mapping the Victorian Social Body

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Mapping the Victorian Social Body

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Pamela K. Gilbert - Author

SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Price: $65.50
Hardcover - 267 pages

Release Date: February 2004

ISBN10: 0-7914-6025-8
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6025-2

Price: $23.95
Paperback - 267 pages

Release Date: February 2004

ISBN10: 0-7914-6026-6
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6026-9

Summary

Explores how medical and social maps helped shape modern perceptions of space.

The cholera epidemics that plagued London in the nineteenth century were a turning point in the science of epidemiology and public health, and the use of maps to pinpoint the source of the disease initiated an explosion of medical and social mapping not only in London but throughout the British Empire as well. Mapping the Victorian Social Body explores the impact of such maps on Victorian and, ultimately, present-day perceptions of space. Tracing the development of cholera mapping from the early sanitary period to the later "medical" period of which John Snow's work was a key example, the book explores how maps of cholera outbreaks, residents' responses to those maps, and the novels of Charles Dickens, who drew heavily on this material, contributed to an emerging vision of London as a metropolis. The book then turns to India, the metropole's colonial other and the perceived source of the disease. In India, the book argues, imperial politics took cholera mapping in a wholly different direction and contributed to Britons' perceptions of Indian space as quite different from that of home. The book concludes by tracing the persistence of Victorian themes in current discourse, particularly in terms of the identification of large cities with cancerous growth and of Africa with AIDS.

“…highly original … Gilbert’s analysis seems an important addition to the panoply of Victorian epistemological innovations … and just as important in helping articulate modern social, political, and national identity.” — Victorian Studies

“[Gilbert] brings the skills of literary and textual analysis to nineteenth-century British and colonial cartography, and the result is an intriguing and relatively unusual study.” — Journal of British Studies

"There is no other study that brings the evolving tradition of health-related mapping to literature. This book will be a crucial portal through which literary scholars can see how epidemiology, mapmaking, and cultural theories of space can produce new readings of literature." — Laura Otis, editor of Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology

Pamela K. Gilbert is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. She is the author of Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. She is also the editor of Imagined Londons and the coeditor (with Marlene Tromp and Aeron Haynie) of Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, both published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

I. INTRODUCTORY

1. Mapping and Social Space in Nineteenth-Century England

II. MAPPING DISEASE IN THE METROPOLE

2. Visible at a Glance: English Sanitary and Medical Maps

3. Invisible to the Naked Eye: John Snow

III. NARRATING METROPOLITAN SPACE

4. A Tale of Two Parishes: Place and Narrative in the London Cholera Epidemic of 1854

5. Medical Mapping, the Thames, and the Body in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend

IV. MAPPING THE BODY OF EMPIRE

6. India in the 1830s: Mapping from the Professional Periphery

7. India in the 1860s: Mapping Imperial Difference

Afterword: Still Visible Today

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Related Subjects

British Studies
Cultural Studies
English Literature

42181/42182(JP/MS/SP)