Social Life of Fluids

Jules David Law

ISBN 10: 0801449308 / ISBN 13: 9780801449307

Published by BERTRAMS PRINT ON DEMAND Sep 2010, 2010

About this Item

Neuware - Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids-blood, breast milk, and water-in Victorian novels, Law traces the culture's growing anxiety about fluids from the 1830s through the 1890s.

Seller Inventory # 9780801449307

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Social Life of Fluids
• Publisher: BERTRAMS PRINT ON DEMAND Sep 2010
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801449308
• ISBN 13: 9780801449307
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 234W x 156H x 14D millimeters 234 millimeters width by 156 millimeters height by 14 millimeters depth
• Weight: 469 grams

About this title

Synopsis

British Victorians were obsessed with fluids―with 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 fluids―blood, breast milk, and water―in 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 1830s through the 1890s. 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.

About the Author

Jules Law is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Charles Deering McCormick is Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards.