Kari Nixon – författare

This book develops a new multimodal theoretical model of contagion for interdisciplinary scholars, featuring contributions from influential scholars spanning the fields of medical humanities, philosophy, political science, media studies, technoculture, literature, and bioethics.

Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.Kept from All Contagion explores the surprising social effects of germ theory in the late nineteenth century. Connecting groups of authors rarely studied in tandem by highlighting their shared interest in changing interpersonal relationships in the wake of germ theory, this book takes a surprising and refreshing stance on studies in medicine and literature.Each chapter focuses on a different disease, discussing the different social policies or dilemmas that arose from new understandings in the 1860s–1890s that these diseases were contagious. The chapters pair these sociohistorical considerations with robust literary analyses that assess the ways authors as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, among others, grappled with these ideas and their various impacts upon different human relationships-marital, filial, and social.Through the trifocal structure of each chapter (microbial, relational, and sociopolitical), the book excavates previously overlooked connections between literary texts that insist upon the life-giving importance of community engagement-the very thing that seemed threatening in the wake of germ theory's revelations. Germ theory seemed to promote self-protection via isolation; the authors covered in Kept from All Contagion resist such tacit biopolitical implications. Instead, as Kari Nixon shows, they repeatedly demonstrate vitalizing interpersonal interactions in spite of-and often because of-their contamination with disease, thus completely upending both the ways Victorians and present-day literary scholars have tended to portray and interpret purity.

Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.Kept from All Contagion explores the surprising social effects of germ theory in the late nineteenth century. Connecting groups of authors rarely studied in tandem by highlighting their shared interest in changing interpersonal relationships in the wake of germ theory, this book takes a surprising and refreshing stance on studies in medicine and literature.Each chapter focuses on a different disease, discussing the different social policies or dilemmas that arose from new understandings in the 1860s–1890s that these diseases were contagious. The chapters pair these sociohistorical considerations with robust literary analyses that assess the ways authors as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, among others, grappled with these ideas and their various impacts upon different human relationships-marital, filial, and social.Through the trifocal structure of each chapter (microbial, relational, and sociopolitical), the book excavates previously overlooked connections between literary texts that insist upon the life-giving importance of community engagement-the very thing that seemed threatening in the wake of germ theory's revelations. Germ theory seemed to promote self-protection via isolation; the authors covered in Kept from All Contagion resist such tacit biopolitical implications. Instead, as Kari Nixon shows, they repeatedly demonstrate vitalizing interpersonal interactions in spite of-and often because of-their contamination with disease, thus completely upending both the ways Victorians and present-day literary scholars have tended to portray and interpret purity.

This book demystifies the cultural work of syphilis from the late nineteenth century to the present. By interrogating the motivations that engender habits of belief, thought, and conduct regarding the disease and notions of the self, this interdisciplinary volume investigates constructions of syphilis that had a significant role in shaping modern subjectivity. Chapters draw from a variety of scholarly methods, such as cultural and literary studies, sociology, and anthropology. Authors unravel the representations and influence of syphilis in various cultural forms: cartography, medical writings, literature, historical periodicals, and contemporary popular discourses such as internet forums and electronic news media.Exploring the ways syphilitic rhetoric responds to, generates, or threatens social systems and cultural capital offers a method by which we can better understand the geographies of blame that are central to the conceptual heritage of the disease. This unique volume will appeal to students and scholars in the medical humanities, medical sociology, the history of medicine, and Victorian and modernist studies.