Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate

ISBN-13: 9780748692958 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 208 str.

Jessica Howell

Opis

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 legacies of colonialism by using images of climate induced illness.

Spis treści

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.