| This dissertation explores British, French, and African writers' recourse to medical metaphors in representing the crises of modernization. It traces the manipulation of highly charged biological doctrines within an imperial context where they became racialized and sexualized. In this discourse on modernity, Africa played a pivotal role as a shadow region whose taint of malady materialized Europe's own latent corruption and unmasked its pretense of civility. Disenchantment with the promise of scientific progress spread through intellectual circles from the fin-de-siecle onwards, reaching epidemic proportions during the "Great War". Increasingly desperate critiques of the industrialized world drew on a tradition of plague writing that reached back to Daniel Defoe, but transformed the classic trope of plague in accordance with contemporary medical and colonial discourses. This growing obsession with pathology contributed to the rise of Modernism, in which narrative decomposes in a manner akin to an ailing body. Despite differences in ideology, the authors treated--Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Albert Camus, and Andre Brink--are unanimous in constructing their visions of modern Europe via the colonial space and the figure of the immigrant who bridges the distance between these worlds, threatening to infect the European body politic with social ills that demand radical cures. This study challenges the ethics of bio-medical influences on literature, elucidates perceptions of contagion germane to the AIDS pandemic, and fills a lacuna in postcolonial and twentieth-century studies. |
