Introduction

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs the singular, outsized role played by one particular emotion — disgust — within this wide-ranging and still-unfolding nineteenth-century drama of civilizational ideology, social transformation, and the universalization of emotion. It argues that disgust has had a tendency to turn up in unexpected places, connecting disparate areas of social life. The chapter places the nineteenth-century discourse of disgust within a wider historical and conceptual arc, one that reaches back into the eighteenth century as well as forward into the twentieth and toward the present. Zooming out from the Darwinian moment, the chapter finds that in the second half of the eighteenth century, disgust was the focus of heated debate among German and British philosophers working in the new field of aesthetics, where the repulsive was taken to be the antithesis of the beautiful; now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the philosophers are joined by neuroscientists, who conduct brain scans of the insula, seeking to elucidate the primal nature of our revulsion. Ultimately, the chapter explores the highly productive nature of this seeming contradiction in the discursive function of Victorian disgust.

Reformist Reading: Reparative Critique, c.1900

“…1 The nineteenth century in particular, he observes, "is a horizon for theory, inasmuch as the past can be a horizon, a set of limits or boundaries no less than a site of expectation." 2 Samalin asks us to recognize "just how many different strains of contemporary theory and how many critical concepts have been produced through confrontation with and re-description of the nineteenth century". 3 Samalin's rich and open-ended list of examples (ranging from Walter Benjamin and C. L. R. James to Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) indicates that critical theory's encounters with the nineteenth century have been tremendously generative.…”

“…2 Samalin asks us to recognize "just how many different strains of contemporary theory and how many critical concepts have been produced through confrontation with and re-description of the nineteenth century". 3 Samalin's rich and open-ended list of examples (ranging from Walter Benjamin and C. L. R. James to Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) indicates that critical theory's encounters with the nineteenth century have been tremendously generative. Indeed, as much recent work in literary theory (notably work conducted under the label of postcritique) has pointed out, the afterlives of the nineteenth century centrally include the hermeneutic procedures of "symptomatic" and "suspicious reading"-that is, styles of critical analysis which attempt to demystify the surface structure of texts by drawing attention to the aesthetic's alleged role in hiding some historical-political raw material that must not be allowed direct expression in the literary work itself.…”