Literary Prophylaxis: Race, Sex, and Disease in Nineteenth-Century British Novels
Open AccessLiterary Prophylaxis: Race, Sex, and Disease in Nineteenth-Century British Novels locates a trope that meets interracial sexuality with disease and death in a collection of nineteenth-century British novels. Terming this trope “literary prophylaxis,” this project reads its authors’ behavior through the analytic of Foucauldian biopolitics, interpreting the poetic justice of these deaths to characterize their nineteenth-century authors as sociocultural sovereigns hoping to instantiate an endogamous ideal within their novels and among their readers. In tracing matters of race, sex, and disease in its novels, this dissertation also engages the topics of colonialism, embodiment, and homoeroticism. It draws on many authors who write about Foucauldian biopolitics, including Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Ann Laura Stoler, and Roberto Esposito. It moves from early-nineteenth-century Britain to twenty-first-century America. Chapter 1 investigates fantasies of disembodiment that appear as a reaction to the grotesque nature of embodiment in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Understanding the desire for disembodiment to undergird the desire for endogamy, chapter 2 delineates literary prophylaxis through detailed critiques of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters. Chapter 3 illustrates paradoxes within literary prophylaxis, as three nineteenth-century adventure novels avoid exogamy at the expense of heterosexuality. Chapter 4 brings the concerns of this dissertation up-to-date, as anti-prophylactic measures in two films of the 2010s run into their own problems, with implications of invasion. In taking up Esposito’s idea of an “affirmative biopolitics,” this final chapter moves toward a conclusion that interrogates the rectitude of even a benevolent biopolitics, considering the dangers of a paradigm run on bare life witnessed throughout Literary Prophylaxis.
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FierroBenson_gwu_0075A_15750.pdf | 2022-03-06 | Open Access |
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