Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World

by Elaine Freedgood

Overview

In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the laboring and middle classes, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities that allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521781084
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/28/2000
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #28
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)
Lexile:	1610L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: the practice of paradise; 1. Banishing panic: J. R. McCulloch, Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy; 2. The rhetoric of visible hands: Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale and the popularization of sanitary reform; 3. Groundless optimism: regression in the service of the ego, England and empire in Victorian ballooning memoirs; 4. The uses of pain: cultural masochism and the colonization of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs; 5. A field for enterprise: the memoirs of David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...an enjoyable and well-written book." Victorian Studies

"Freedgood's work is most compelling..." Albion

From the Publisher