Kari Nixon’s monograph has the distinction of being a book about reacting to pandemics written and published right before the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, thus challenging so much of our knowledge about the public and disease. While a fascinating study in nineteenth-century attitudes toward germ theory and contagion, the book is also interesting from a predictive standpoint as it addresses many of the controversies about protection and personal risk that have come to dominate current public discourse. Nixon’s book highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century authors defy principles of isolation from contagion and how fiction “subverts germ theory specifically and unmitigated scientific authority more generally by defiantly and consistently illustrating intimate relationships as fruitful and meaningful in spite of—and sometimes because of—infectious contact” (5). The idea of sanitization becomes connected to the antibiotic, a process that renders matter lifeless, and thus circulation is both proper and necessary for healthy...
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Book Review|
November 01 2022
Kept From All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature
Nixon, Kari.
Kept From All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature
. Buffalo
: State University of New York Press
, 2020.
263
pp. Hardback $95.00. Paper $32.95.
Jennifer Fuller
Jennifer Fuller
Jackson State University
Jennifer Fuller is Assistant Professor of English at Jackson State University. She is the author of Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (2016) and a number of articles on British colonial fiction set in the Pacific islands. She is currently writing a book that explores scientific literacy in nineteenth-century fiction and has recently been awarded a Trinity Hall Cambridge Exchange Fellowship from the Huntington Library.
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Victorians Institute Journal (2022) 49: 250–252.
Citation
Jennifer Fuller; Kept From All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature. Victorians Institute Journal 1 November 2022; 49 250–252. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.49.2022.0250
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