Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture

This book studies dirt in 19C English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Drawing on Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, it enhances scholarship on the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. Chapters ask how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality, discussing texts by a wide range of authors. Schülting analyzes the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation.