Exploring Victorian Travel Literature
Disease, Race and Climate
Published on 14. May 2014
Book
Hardback
208 pages
978-0-7486-9295-8 (ISBN)
Description
This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Well-known authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to 'write back' to the legacy of colonialism by using images of illness from climate.
Reviews / Votes
By linking illness to the African environment, the five British writers Howell discusses wrote illness into the framework of Victorian once-popular disease theories. By adeptly exploring how and why her authors clung to anachronistic ideas, Jessica Howell makes a significant contribution to the histories of both science and literature. * Barbara T. Gates, Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Delaware * Starting with Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures, Jessica Howell's insightful study of Victorian travel writing emphasizes reactions to climate and disease. This is an excellent addition to analyses of nineteenth-century discourse about "the tropics." * Patrick Brantlinger, James Rudy Professor of English, Indiana University * Exploring Victorian Travel Literature is a welcome addition to the literature on a range of themes congregating around the construction of tropicality, the politics of climatic discourse, medical-moral meteorology and the racial economy of health and disease. Howell expertly uncovers the diverse, and often contradictory, uses of climatic determinism in the age of high empire. It is to be hoped that its lingering echoes in our own day will not escape the notice of readers. -- David N. Livingstone, Queen's University, Belfast * Social History of Medicine, vol 28, no 4 *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
499 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7486-9295-8 (9780748692958)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
05/2014
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€0.00
Available for download
Person
Jessica Howell is Wellcome Research Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities and Health, King's College London, where she researches health and the literature of empire. Her work bridges the fields of Victorian studies and the Medical Humanities by examining colonial illness narratives. She also serves on the board of editors for the University of California Medical Humanities book series with Rodopi.
Content
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Prescribing hybridity: climate and the Victorian mixed-race subject; 2. 'It was too dangerous a place to show fear': mapping disease and the body; 3. To 'pay most dearly for their folly': the climate of African nationalism; 4. 'Climate proof': women travellers and survival; 5. 'Self rather seedy': colonial pathography; Afterword; Bibliography.