This article discusses the representation of contagious diseases in Emma Donoghue's Frog Music (2014) and Michael Nava's The City of Palaces (2014). It argues that, in the two texts, disease is used to illuminate instances of discrimination and exclusion in the nineteenth century, thus inviting a consideration of the issue of (non)belonging then and now, as well as within neo-Victorianism. In particular, the article aims to show that the two texts utilise disease to shed light on the abjection of particular ethnic groups in the nineteenth century, and that in doing so they allude to contemporary issues of exclusion. Furthermore, the two texts employ disease to suggest connections between these abjected Others and the female protagonists, emphasising that the latter too are vulnerable to arbitrary violence from various figures of authority as a result of their sociopolitical disempowerment. Finally, the article raises questions about the ethics of mediating the experiences of marginalised communities through the perspectives of those with greater societal privilege and discusses the implications of this narrative strategy for neo-Victorian fiction and scholarship.
Scientists, epidemiologists and medical researchers, who in their past studies on Coronavirus focused on the detection of its origin and on tracing back the trail of contagion, often compared their activity to Sherlock Holmes's investigations. In particular, references to Sherlock Holmes occurred in some Chinese medical reports, which alluded to this wellknown literary and cultural icon to suggest the international relevance of the battle against COVID-19. In this respect, Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Dying Detective' (1913), a short story in which Holmes is (seemingly) infected by a deadly tropical disease, may be seen as an expression of what I call 'the Sherlock Holmes Paradigm'. This paradigm identifies the investigator's fight against disease and infection coming from outside the margins of the British empire; at the same time, the detective's investigations lead to the awareness that these infections are not necessarily caused by an 'external' source but originate within the boundaries of the British Empire. 'The Sherlock Holmes Paradigm' has also been adopted and updated in a series of neo-Victorian texts that directly or indirectly borrow elements from Holmes's adventures: from David Stuart Davies's Sherlock Holmes: The Shadow of the Rat (2010) to Tom Holland's Supping with Panthers (1996) and George Mann's The Affinity Bridge (2008); in these novels, Sherlock Holmes and Holmesian investigators have to face diseases contaminating London, proving that the scientific methods used by Doyle's detective are an extremely useful approach in both medical and literary discourse, in particular as regards the complex relationship between the ideas of 'centre' and 'margins'.
"He understood in that moment, before collapsing onto the bed in agony, that seeing the present in the past was the same thing as imagining the future." (Pamuk 2023: 510)
Andrea Barrett's neo-Victorian short story 'Ship Fever' (1996) portrays the catastrophic conditions on the Canadian quarantine island Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence River off the coast of Quebec in 1847 when hundreds of starving, typhus-infected Irish people, displaced by British colonial occupation and the Great Famine, arrived there in what came to be known as the coffin ships. By contracting the vast historical and geographical landscape of this episode of epidemic contagion to the small Canadian quarantine island and portraying it as the heterotopic mirror of Famine Ireland, the short story form enables a narrowing of focus on typhus as a little-understood infectious disease at a point of intensifying crisis. My close reading of the story traces the intertextual 'web of affinities' activated by the constellation of heterotopic sites, which also uncovers a link with George Eliot's writing on contagion in Middlemarch (1871-1872).
Victorian fictional representations of infection tended to equate normalcy with a healthy state and compliance with the established order, categorising outcasts and non-compliant individuals as enemies of development and menaces to society. This article examines two televisual adaptations of Frankenstein's creature, which interrogate the resulting conflations of non-normative characters with 'carrier of contagion' that precipitate cultural degeneration. In Penny Dreadful, during the outbreak of a near-apocalyptic infection, the reanimated John Clare disrupts his creator's unethical scientific work of resuscitating corpses. In The Frankenstein Chronicles, the police officer John Marlott is infected with syphilis before becoming an 'undead being', while he investigates the moral corruption at the heart of an epidemic plaguing the poorest districts of London. Both ostracised 'monsters' decode the rotten mechanisms of society, exposing a body politic plagued by economic inequality and inhumanity through acts of (counter-cultural) viropolitical resistance. Subversively, the two neo-Victorian texts thus also metaphorically 'contaminate' the literary canon of horror fiction, refiguring 'monsters' as quasi-political activists.
