Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate
Jessica Howell
Abstract
This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot in travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to ‘write ... More
Keywords: travel writing, Victorian literature and culture, racial science, climate, tropical medicine, illness narrative, gender and empire
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 | Print ISBN-13: 9780748692958 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: January 2015 | DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748692958.001.0001 |
