Victorian Britain witnessed a resurgence of traditional convalescent caregiving. In the face of a hectic modern existence, nineteenth-century thinkers argued that all medical patients desperately required a lengthy, meandering period of recovery. Various reformers worked to extend the benefits of holistic recuperative care to seemingly unlikely groups: working-class hospital patients, insane asylum inmates, even low-ranking soldiers across the British Empire. Hosanna Krienke offers the first sustained scholarly assessment of nineteenth-century convalescent culture, revealing how interpersonal post-acute care was touted as a critical supplement to modern scientific medicine. As a method of caregiving intended to alleviate both physical and social ills, convalescence united patients of disparate social classes, disease categories, and degrees of impairment. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how novels from Bleak House to The Secret Garden draw on the unhurried timescale of convalescence as an ethical paradigm, training readers to value unfolding narratives apart from their ultimate resolutions.

Macabre tales of death and mourning in Victorian America.

'This book is one of the most impressive critical analyses of nineteenth-century literary culture that I have read in a long time. A closely written and argued discussion of theories of literary influence in a nineteenth-century context, it ranges widely and makes always interesting and sometimes brilliant connections...This is a major work of Victorian literary criticism, and a book to be read over and over again for its myriad insights and felicities.' -Tennyson Research Bulletin'Close readings unravel the manner in which 'dead' voices haunt Tennyson's poetry, and the author is uncommonly sharp-eared for nuance.' -Scotland on Sunday'Ambitious, delightful, frustrating, wide-ranging, often beautifully written... Its sheer range sets it apart from the usual academic monograph... refreshingly free of jargon.' -Angela Leighton, Times Literary Supplement'One of the enjoyable features of Douglas-Fairhurst's writing is its commitment to close reading. He can make a word or line come alive by a turn of phrase which resonantly prolongs its momentum.' -Angela Leighton, Times Literary SupplementThis major study examines a Victorian obsession with 'influence', the often unpredictable after-effects of words and actions, in fields as diverse as mesmerism and theology, literary theory and sanitation reform. For writers such as Tennyson, FitzGerald and Dickens, the idea is both a theoretical and a practical problem.Survival is not only what their writing critically examines, but also what it sets out to achieve.

British Victorians were obsessed with fluids—with their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. In The Social Life of Fluids Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel. Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids—blood, breast milk, and water—in six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830s through the 1890s. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates.

An award-winning writer explores the patchwork American cultural history of grieving the departed. One family inters their matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a green-burial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a leading contemporary burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. A grieving mother, 150 years ago, might spend her days tending a garden at her daughter’s grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected where her daughter was killed. One mother wears a locket containing her daughter’s hair; the other, a necklace containing her ashes. What happens after someone dies depends on our personal stories and on where those stories fall in a larger tale―that of death in America. It’s a powerful tale that we usually keep hidden from our everyday lives until we have to face it. American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney reveals this world through a collective portrait of Americans past and present who are personally involved with death: obit writers in the desert, an Atlantic funeral voyage, a fourth-generation funeral director―even a midwestern museum that shows us our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another, revealing a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny. “Sweeney’s quest for the “why” behind mourning rituals has given us a book in the best tradition of narrative journalism.”—Jessica Handler, author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss