The Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers-including Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Bronte-whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period.

Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London's sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventions of literary realism to the emergence of urban sociology, the rise of new scientific theories of instinct, and the techniques of colonial administration developed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By bringing to light disgust's role as a public passion, The Masses Are Revolting reveals significant new connections among these apparently disconnected forms of social control, knowledge production, and infrastructural development.

About the Author

Zachary Samalin is Assistant Professor of English at New York University. His research and writing focuses on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, affect theory and the history of emotions, and the history of literary and critical theory.

Reviews

The assiduity with which Samalin has charted 1857 to 1860 is complemented by the laser-like precision with which he has uncovered a valuable array of arguments and ideas that would be largely illegible without the cogent and precise accounting of disgust this book ably puts forth.

* Victorian Studies *

This rich genealogy of theory, and the preference for historicist method, leave open a number of avenues of conceptual exploration that should invigorate readers. [Tthe book so voraciously reads primary nineteenth-century journalism, social science, and evolutionary science, and so skillfully threads these with twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology, law, and social theory, while nonetheless defining its core object as "political aesthetics."

* Modern Philology *


Awards
Winner of Sonya Rudikoff Award 2023 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781501756467
Author Zachary Samalin
Format Hardback
Page Count 342
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 28mm