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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Touching Bodies/Bodies Touching: The Ethics Of Touch In Victorian Literature (1860-1900), Ann M.C. Gagne
Touching Bodies/Bodies Touching: The Ethics Of Touch In Victorian Literature (1860-1900), Ann M.C. Gagne
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Tactility becomes a marked preoccupation in mid-Victorian literature. The description of how characters touch one another and negotiate their surroundings through tactility reinforces the ethics of intersubjectivity in Victorian England. I argue that touch becomes representative of embodied experience in Victorian literature. As well, touch goes beyond the explicit moral taxonomies found in etiquette books to provide implicit guiding principles for the negotiation of both the public and the private. The Contagious Diseases Acts (CDAs) serve as a point of departure for an analysis of tactility in Victorian literature for the CDAs emphasized and reinforced the importance of legislating touch. …
Biological Inheritance And The Social Order In Late-Victorian Fiction And Science, Sherrin Berezowsky
Biological Inheritance And The Social Order In Late-Victorian Fiction And Science, Sherrin Berezowsky
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation investigates the heightened interest in heredity as a biological inheritance that arises after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and how this interest intersects with concerns about class mobility and the shifting social order. Within this framework, this project considers how heredity became a means of organizing and regulating bodies in keeping with what Michel Foucault terms bio-power. It unearths the cultural work within literary and scientific writings as they respond to narratives of self-help and self-improvement by imagining heredity as a means of stabilizing the social order, and by extension the nation, at …