Research Catalog

Victorian writing about risk : imagining a safe England in a dangerous world

Title
Victorian writing about risk : imagining a safe England in a dangerous world / Elaine Freedgood.
Author
Freedgood, Elaine.
Publication
Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
TextUse in library PR756.T72 F74 2000Off-site

Details

Description
xii, 216 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
Summary
"In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on politic economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, Alpine mountaineering and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the laboring and middle classes, the English and the Irish, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities that allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places. The texts that this study focuses on reveal the ways in which risk moralizes and naturalizes the economic and political institutions of industrial, imperial culture during a period of unprecedented expansion and change."--Jacket.
Series Statement
Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 28
Uniform Title
Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 28.
Subject
  • Zielke-Nadkarni, Andrea 1956-
  • 1800-1901
  • Travelers' writings, English > History and criticism
  • English prose literature > 19th century > History and criticism
  • Risk perception > Great Britain > History > 19th century
  • British > Foreign countries > History > 19th century
  • Travel writing > History > 19th century
  • Travel in literature
  • Risk in literature
  • Autobiography
  • Autobiographies as Topic
  • autobiography (genre)
  • British > Foreign countries
  • Diplomatic relations
  • English prose literature
  • Risk perception
  • Travel writing
  • Travelers' writings, English
  • Reiseliteratur
  • Abenteuerliteratur
  • Risico nemen
  • Victoriaanse tijd
  • Veiligheid
  • Reisverhalen
  • British > Travel > History > Foreign countries > 19th century
  • Great Britain > Foreign relations > 1837-1901
  • Great Britain
  • Englisch
Genre/Form
  • Autobiography
  • Autobiographies.
  • Criticism, interpretation, etc.
  • History.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-211) and index.
Contents
Introduction: the practice of paradise -- 1. Banishing panic: J.R. McCulloch, Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy -- 2. The rhetoric of visible hands: Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale and the popularization of sanitary reform -- 3. Groundless optimism: regression in the service of the ego, England and empire in Victorian ballooning memoirs -- 4. The uses of pain: cultural masochism and the colonization of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs -- 5. A field for enterprise: the memoirs of David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley.
ISBN
  • 0521781086
  • 9780521781084
  • 0521028728
  • 9780521028721
LCCN
99086371
OCLC
  • ocm43287137
  • 43287137
  • SCSB-14542614
Owning Institutions
Princeton University Library