| Notwithstanding the perceived divide between human and nonhuman parasites, this project attempts to develop a theory and history of parasitism that takes into consideration their ongoing, mutually constitutive relationship. Rooted in an ancient literary topos, the term "parasite" took on new meaning as it became a way to describe an economic problem; by the nineteenth century, parasitism had become a subject of biological and then sociological study. If this dissertation acknowledges that the idea of the nonhuman parasite has been tied to questions of human relationality from the start, then, it also argues that the rise of biological parasitism has likewise affected our understanding of social networks, environment, labor, progress, and life since the nineteenth century. Rather than merely reflecting realities in "nature" or "society," I argue, in the nineteenth century the parasite gave imaginative form to new ways of thinking about the relationships between organisms, human and nonhuman alike. As I show, Victorian writers, scientists, and intellectuals used parasites to figure the surprisingly complex and often painful interdependencies that seemed to increasingly define social and biological systems. Each of the project's chapters thus considers the ways in which Victorian writers studied, accommodated, and even appreciated this relation. Drawing on the work of Louis Figuier, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Thomas Spencer Cobbold, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, and John Ruskin, among others ---not to mention writers such as Peter Sloterdijk, Michel Serres, Lynn Margulis, and Bruno Latour---"Parasites" examines the ways in which Victorian writers treated parasitism as an exemplary intimate relation, a dependency that had the potential to strengthen as well as damage the communities and environments with which it was associated. |
