Kept from All Contagion, Nixon Kari

Through the trifocal structure of each chapter (microbial, relational, and sociopolitical), the book excavates previously overlooked connections between literary texts that insist upon the life-giving importance of community engagement--the very thing that seemed threatening in the wake of germ theorys revelations. Germ theory seemed to promote self-protection via isolation; the authors covered in Kept from All Contagion resist such tacit biopolitical implications. Instead, as Kari Nixon shows, they repeatedly demonstrate vitalizing interpersonal interactions in spite of--and often because of--their contamination with disease, thus completely upending both the ways Victorians and present-day literary scholars have tended to portray and interpret purity.