The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust
Zachary Samalin
Abstract
This book reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, the book highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. The book focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period. I ... More
This book reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, the book highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. The book focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period. It elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London's sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventions of literary realism to the emergence of urban sociology, the rise of new scientific theories of instinct, and the techniques of colonial administration developed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By bringing to light disgust's role as a public passion, the book reveals significant new connections among these apparently disconnected forms of social control, knowledge production, and infrastructural development.
Keywords:
affect,
emotion,
negative emotional response,
modern British society,
Victorian disgust,
British society,
obscenity law,
urban sociology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501756467 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501756467.001.0001 |
