Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire : Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia

Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire looks at the relationship between epidemics and famines in south Asia and Victorian literature and culture. It suggests that much of how we think today about disasters, state and society can be traced back to the 19th-century British imperial experience. "How did the Victorians think about disasters such as famines and epidemic diseases? What was the relationship between such cataclysmic events and literary forms, styles and genres? In what way was thinking about disasters also crucial to practices of governance? Does the legacy of such Victorian thinking still shape our contemporary responses to 'natural' disasters? This book seeks to answer such questions by looking at a wide range of administrative, medical, historical, journalistic and literary texts written about Britain's key imperial possession in the 19th-century - south Asia. In doing so, it expands our ideas about Victorian literature, just as it reshapes our definitions of 'natural' disasters themselves"-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-vii Introduction....Pages 1-28 The Empire of Disasters....Pages 29-60 Disaster Tourism: The Edens and Fanny Parks....Pages 61-87 Philip Meadows Taylor: The Bureaucrat as Healer....Pages 88-130 ‘The Dead Who Did Not Die’: Rudyard Kipling and Cholera....Pages 131-166 Gendering Disaster: Flora Annie Steel....Pages 167-198 Coda....Pages 199-204 Back Matter....Pages 205-221