Description
Book SynopsisThe Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion''s socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkersincluding Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Brontëwhose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period.
Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London''s sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the convent
Trade Review
The assiduity with which Samalin has charted 1857 to 1860 is complemented by the laser-like precision with which he has uncovered a valuable array of arguments and ideas that would be largely illegible without the cogent and precise accounting of disgust this book ably puts forth.
* Victorian Studies *
This rich genealogy of theory, and the preference for historicist method, leave open a number of avenues of conceptual exploration that should invigorate readers. [Tthe book so voraciously reads primary nineteenth-century journalism, social science, and evolutionary science, and so skillfully threads these with twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology, law, and social theory, while nonetheless defining its core object as "political aesthetics."
* Modern Philology *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Of Origins and Orifices
Part I: The Rationalization of Revulsion
1. The Odor of Things
2. Realism and Repulsion
Part II.: Primal Scenes, Human Sciences
3. Darwin's Vomit
4. The Masses Are Revolting; or, The Birth of Social Theory from the Spirit of Disgust
Part III: The Disenchantment of Disgust
5. The Age of Obscenity
Conclusion: Horizons of Expectoration
