Jacob Meister

Jacob Meister is a specialist of nineteenth-century French, Russian, and British literature, and a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature. His dissertation project, “Sanitizing Narratives: Urban Health in Nineteenth-Century European Fiction,” examines two interconnected fields of artistic and intellectual inquiry in a transnational context: the flourishing genre of the social problem novel in French, Russian, and British literature of this period, and the representation of urban misery as an unsightly affront to emerging notions of public health and hygiene. One of the principal arguments animating his dissertation is that the broader social ills that novelists diagnose—intergenerational poverty, class conflict, the precarious organization of labor, insalubrious housing and its deleterious effects on society—are unthinkable without their shared backdrop of the industrial city.

Drawing upon the pioneering works of hygienists and socio-political commentators in France and Great Britain, “Sanitizing Narratives” argues that the nineteenth-century European novel expresses a distinct unease with placing the poor and the criminal elements of society within the middle-class confines of the novel, and the ideas of thinkers such as Claude Lachaise, Edwin Chadwick, Benoiston de Chateauneuf, and Semyon Gaevskii provide authors of this period with a hygienist-tinted vocabulary to not only name intractable social problems of urban life, but also to situate the poor and criminal. Each chapter in “Sanitizing Narratives” traces the overlapping ideological work that nineteenth-century novels and medical treatises do to consider the impoverished and criminal elements of urban society, while attending to meaningful differences in literary traditions, politics, and form among the texts discussed. Jacob’s research on urban sketches, or physiologies, has been published in The Balzac Review, and other work on biological determinism in French literature has been published in George Sand Studies.