《大众在反抗》重塑了情感和情感史上的一个关键时代，深入研究了19世纪厌恶的档案，展示了这种消极的情感反应如何在现代英国社会的出现中发挥了巨大而不稳定的作用。扎卡里·萨马林（Zachary Samalin）强调了情感在社会中的作用，强调了维多利亚时代厌恶的具体场景，从下水道隧道和法庭到手术台和小巷。萨马林关注的是19世纪各种各样的作家和思想家——包括查尔斯·达尔文、查尔斯·狄更斯、卡尔·马克思、弗里德里希·恩格斯、托马斯·哈代、乔治·吉辛和夏洛特·勃朗特——他们的作品反映了厌恶在整个时期不断变化、不稳定的含义。
萨马林在英国社会的特定领域阐述了维多利亚时代厌恶的文化史，从伦敦下水道系统的建设、现代淫秽法的诞生、文学现实主义惯例的发展到城市社会学的出现、新的本能科学理论的兴起，殖民管理的技术在1857年印度叛乱期间发展起来。通过揭示厌恶作为一种公众激情的作用，《大众正在反抗》揭示了这些明显脱节的社会控制、知识生产和基础设施发展形式之间的重要新联系。
The Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust
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 Brontë―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.
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