The masses are revolting: Victorian culture and the aesthetics of disgust
Item
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Title
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The masses are revolting: Victorian culture and the aesthetics of disgust
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:6661f4358d18:11865
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identifier
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12499
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Creator
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Samalin, Zachary,
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Contributor
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John Brenkman
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | European studies
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Abstract
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The Masses Are Revolting makes two overarching claims about the interrelation of disgust and aesthetics in Victorian culture and literature. First, I place the Victorian novel's focus on the newly repulsive conditions of British society in dialogue with the privileged position Enlightenment aesthetics afforded to the disgusting as the antithesis of the beautiful. An object which disgusts cannot be aesthetically pleasing, the story goes, since it is felt to be as repulsive in art as in nature. Traditional aesthetics thus prohibited the disgusting from artistic and literary composition, because it was thought to overflow the representational frame and preclude disinterested judgment. Through close readings of works by Charlotte Bronte, John Ruskin, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing, I argue that Victorian literary texts, to the contrary, took this boundary confusion between disgusting representations and disgusting realities as a point of departure, and so broke much more sharply with the 18th and early 19th century discourse of taste and beauty than has conventionally been acknowledged. Second, while emphasizing this disconnect between Victorian literary practice and aesthetic theory, I also examine the unprecedented importance that Victorians afforded to disgust as a public and political passion, focusing in individual chapters on the complex roles that disgust played in Victorian medicine, physiology, obscenity law, and sanitation. In a chapter surveying the documentation of the 1858 Great Stink of London, for example, I argue that the Victorian rhetoric of social revulsion produced in the wake of the sewage crisis derived from the Enlightenment discourse of aesthetic judgment. Thus, while Victorian literature industriously flouted the aesthetic prohibition of the disgusting, industrial society absorbed it.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
