Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels by Pamela K. Gilbert

This is a really wonderful study of the 'sensation novel' genre and the implications of the language of disease, the body and contagion in the novels themselves and around them. It's very well-argued and beautifully structured, it's both challenging and accessible, and the ideas it presents are original and firmly grounded in previous authors' work. I would recommend the first chapter to anyone studying literature at all; it gives a wonderful historical and theoretical context for the book and is extremely interesting and stimulating to read. I found so many new (to me) ideas and ways of thinking in this book, I'm very enthusiastic about it. I'm not sure I liked the conclusion, because Gilbert compared the policing of the content of Victorian women's fiction to the present-day policing of violence on television (because I believe that violence on television should be policed and controlled), but on the other hand, her comparison with discourses surrounding AIDS were very convincing. Anyways, a great and innovative literary study that is both polite and assertive in tone (argues convincingly instead of shouting literary jargon).