Courses

Contagion is a common feature of the Victorian literary imagination. And for good reason: contagious diseases proliferated in the 19th century, when transmission theories and treatment methods were still in flux. Many Victorian novels explicitly represent these epidemic illnesses, which might afflict specific characters or connect whole communities through networks of infection. But in addition to indexing the physical body’s very real susceptibility to communicable disease, the figure of contagion also harbors significant symbolic potential. What exactly did contagion mean for British writers in the 19th century? Who or what is identified as contagious in Victorian novels—and why?

Our course takes these questions as a launch pad for studying contagion and the Victorian novel. Beginning with texts in which contagious disease plays an obvious role, we’ll make our way through a series of novels in which actual contagion features less and less overtly, but in which the idea of contagion maintains an influential presence. We’ll also read contemporary essays that offer critical frameworks for considering contagion from various angles: as an object of scientific and medical study; as a phenomenon that amplifies rhetorics and practices of racism and xenophobia; and as a symptom of interconnected life, in all its vulnerability. And we’ll think together about the place of the novel in 19th-century discourses on contagion. What made this literary form well-suited to exploring contagion’s causes and effects? What do we make of the fact that Victorian novels themselves were often seen as both literally and figuratively “contagious”?

Novelists whose work we will engage with and compare include Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. As an aid to our comparative analysis, we’ll learn to use digital humanities tools Hypothesis and Palladio, which enable collaborative annotations of electronic texts and visual mapping of data. Using these programs, course participants will work together on a semester-long project of mapping contagion across Victorian novels: a “contact tracing” exercise that will allow us to make compelling connections among many different representations of contagion. At the same time, this class is also an experiment in the possibilities and limitations of a consciously “presentist” approach to literature: a way of engaging with literary works so as to illuminate contemporary concerns.