Victorian writing about risk
Subtitle: imagining a safe England in a dangerous world
By: Elaine Freedgood.
Series: Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ;; 28
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Cambridge [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
Subjects: Travelers' writings, English -- History and criticism.; English prose literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Risk perception -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.; British -- Foreign countries -- History -- 19th century.; Travel writing -- History -- 19th century.; Travel in literature.; Risk in literature.; Autobiography.; Great Britain -- Foreign relations -- 1837-1901.
Description: "In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on politic economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, Alpine mountaineering and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places.

Women, men, the laboring and middle classes, the English and the Irish, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities that allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places. The texts that this study focuses on reveal the ways in which risk moralizes and naturalizes the economic and political institutions of industrial, imperial culture during a period of unprecedented expansion and change."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-211) and index.