This intriguing book examines the ways contagion - or disease - inform and shape a wide variety of nineteenth century texts and contexts.

Christensen dissects the cultural assumptions concerning disease, health, impurity and so on before exploring different perspectives on key themes such as plague, nursing and the hospital environment and focusing on certain key texts including Dickens's Bleak House, Gaskell's Ruth, and Zola's Le Docteur Pascal.

Allan Conrad Christensen is Professor of English at John Cabot University in Rome. He is the author of Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions (1976) and a book on the Italian Victorian novelist Giovanni Ruffini (1996).