Research Catalog

Title

The social life of fluids : blood, milk, and water in the Victorian novel / Jules Law.

Author

Law, Jules David, 1957-

Publication

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 204 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

• British Victorians were obsessed with fluidsùwith their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. In The Social Life of Fluids Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel.
• Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluidsùblood, breast milk, and waterùin six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830Æs through the 1890Æs. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates. --Book Jacket.

Subject

• Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 > Criticism and interpretation
• Eliot, George, 1819-1880 > Criticism and interpretation
• Moore, George, 1852-1933 > Criticism and interpretation
• Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912
• Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
• Eliot, George, 1819-1880
• Moore, George, 1852-1933
• Dracula (Stoker, Bram)
• 1800-1899
• English fiction > 19th century > History and criticism
• Body fluids in literature
• English fiction
• Körperflüssigkeit > Motiv > Roman > englischer
• Roman > englischer > Motiv > Körperflüssigkeit
• Literatur
• Englisch
• Motiv
• Körperflüssigkeit

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction : dark ecologies : A tale of two cities and "The cow with the iron tail" -- Disavowing milk : psychic disintegration and domestic reintegration in Dickens's Dombey and son -- A river runs through him : Our mutual friend and the embankment of the Thames -- Perilous reversals : fluid exchange in George Eliot's early works -- Merging with others : destiny and flow in Daniel Deronda -- Tempted by the milk of another : the fantasy of limited circulation in Esther Waters -- Ever-widening circulations : Dracula and the fear of management.

ISBN

• 9780801449307
• 0801449308

LCCN

• 2010022622
• 40018445423

OCLC

• ocn617604060
• 617604060
• SCSB-14508619

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library