Anticontagionism and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Literature
Journal: Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Year: 2019

“Anticontagionism and Social Reform in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Literature” explores the relationship between anticontagionism and the social role of the writer in England and America in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Anticontagionism posited that epidemic disease was not contagious, but instead was spread through filth-generated miasmas. For socially conscious writers who believed in this popular theory (Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman