This dissertation is an exploration of the discourses of disaster in nineteenth-century England and France. I focus on a variety of catastrophic events that raise urgent questions about social vulnerability in this period, including floods, railway collisions, famines, and epidemics. As part of everyday life in the nineteenth century, the threat of disaster made specific demands on both individuals and social formations. My project traces the ways in which discourses of disaster became embedded in lived experience for individuals and collectives. This dissertation, then, is a phenomenological history of the disastrous nineteenth century, an exploration of how it feels to live in a time of catastrophe.
In my chapters, I focus on specific aspects of lived experience and their relationship to disaster narratives. My readings encompass a wide range of texts, including literary works, as well as scientific, journalistic, medical, and historical discourses. In the geological work of Georges Cuvier and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, I identify a narrative logic of impending disaster and its corresponding affect of dread. Reading medical treatises alongside depictions of railway accidents by Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Émile Zola, I argue for a model of disaster as a type of contagious public trauma. Finally, in a reading of Bleak House, I explore the incipient discourses of catastrophization and ethical responsibility that developed during the cholera epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century. By elaborating these discourses and their genealogy in the nineteenth century, I provide a way of considering our own lived experiences in the disastrous present of the Anthropocene.
