Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Alison McQueen

Although the noted nineteenth-century Danish-Jewish writer Meïr Goldschmidt (1819–1887) made his entry into literature with a novel on Jewish themes, his later novels treated non-Jewish subjects, and his Jewish heritage appeared progressively to recede into the background of his public image. Literary historians have paid little attention to his complex perception of his own Jewishness and have made no effort to discover the immense significance he himself felt that Judaism had for his life and for his literary works. Moreover, no previous study has comprehensively treated Goldschmidt’s far-reaching network of interrelationships with an astonishing number of other major Jewish cultural figures of nineteenth-century Europe. During his restless travels crisscrossing Europe, which were facilitated by his phenomenal knowledge of the major European languages, he habitually sought out and associated with the leading Jewish figures in literature, the arts, journalism, and religion, but this fact and the resulting mutually influential connections he formed have been overlooked and ignored. This is the first focused and documented study of the Jewish aspect of Goldschmidt’s life, so vitally important to Goldschmidt himself and so indispensable to a complete understanding of his place in Danish and in world literatures.

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Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts

10.2307/j.ctv12sdvn4 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

The Arts ◽

The Media

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‘Epidemics in a Mist’: Medical Climatology and Cholera in Victorian Visual Culture

Journal of Victorian Culture ◽

10.1093/jvcult/vcaa020 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 25 (4) ◽

pp. 492-511

Author(s):

Amanda Sciampacone

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Visual Culture ◽

Mortality Rates ◽

Tropical Environment ◽

Atmospheric Conditions ◽

Vital Force ◽

Real Material ◽

Climate And Health ◽

Crucial Part ◽

Epidemic Diseases

Abstract The article explores how Victorian visual culture was a vital force in the construction and dissemination of medical theories on the connection between climate and health. During the nineteenth century, the seemingly inexplicable and deadly nature of many epidemic diseases compelled British medics to investigate all possible reasons for their spread. Focusing on cholera, the article will examine how, in an effort to understand what was seen at the time as a mysterious disease, Victorian medics increasingly concentrated on the climate of India and unusual weather in Britain as propagators of the malady. Supplementing the dominant miasma theory, medics explained how the seemingly airborne sources of cholera resulted from a state of England’s air that resembled the tropical environment of the subcontinent. In an effort to highlight the correlation between cholera and the atmosphere, they produced medical climatology reports containing diagrams that juxtaposed the data on the disease’s mortality rates with measurements of meteorological phenomena. These images, rather than serving simply as illustrations, became a crucial part of medical arguments. As the article will demonstrate, in attempting to visualize the medical climatology of cholera, the diagrams mapped the disease to certain atmospheric conditions, suggesting that cholera could be quantified and controlled. Yet, in doing so, the images also implied that cholera had a real material presence in the air of Britain, powerfully evoking visual tropes of the disease as a substance that had the potential to contaminate the very landscape of the nation.

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