Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture - 9780367175719

Taylor & Francis

Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing \u2013 industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be \""matter out of place,\"" challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the \""civilizing process.\"" Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filth in realist novels an.