The Department
of English,
Bharati College
invites you
to a lecture
titled
‘The Moral as
Physical: Disease in Oliver Twist and Bleak House’
to be delivered by
Ms. Debolina Dey,
Assistant Professor, Department of English,
Lady Shri Ram College for Women,
University of Delhi
on Tuesday, 3rd February 2015
in the college
Seminar Room
from 10:50 AM to
11:45 AM.
Abstract:
My talk proposes to look at “the
ubiquity of contagion as a master narrative in Victorian culture” specifically
through the novels of Charles Dickens by focusing on Oliver Twist and Bleak
House. I argue that significant to this narrative of contagion is not only
the ‘miasmic thinking’ through which contagion functions in the novels, but
more importantly for the Victorians contagion as a metaphor goes back to the
debates about philanthropy and the figure of the circulating vagabond,
embodying the contagion both literally and metaphorically.
I propose to look at contagion in two
ways: one, the idea of contagion through the debates around the Poor Law
represented in Dickens’ Oliver Twist; and two, contagion as disease
through Bleak House in the context of the emergence of ‘public health’
in the latter half of nineteenth century.
For more
details, feel free to call/text Ms. Neha Garg at 08376018059 or email to
conf.eng.bc@gmail.com