Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature , by Kari Nixon
- Autores: Arden Hegele
- Localización: Nuncius: annali di storia della scienza, ISSN 0394-7394, Vol. 38, Nº. 1, 2023, págs. 214-216
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Kari Nixon, Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature . Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. 274 pp. ISBN: 9781438478487.
Kari Nixon’s brave and eloquent Kept from All Contagion is the one book that, at this moment, I most needed to read. Any book published in 2020 will inevitably be read through the conditions of pandemic, but this book, on the representation of contagious disease in nineteenth-century literature, proves to be spookily prescient. Through its attention to historical coping strategies to living with contagious disease, the book has the potential to reshape our own response to endemic contagion. At issue for the Victorian writers at the heart of the book are the fundamental questions that drive our own everyday decision-making during Covid-19. Nixon, and the Victorians she reads, together ask: is the “connective tissue” of human networks a source of mutual support, or a “noxious” purveyor of disease (p. 3)? Is quarantine “safe and pure” or “stifling, and possibly disease-ridden” (p. 135)? And most importantly—is the “vitalizing contact” of human relationships “worth the risk” of becoming sick (p. 218)?
