Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire ― Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia

How did the Victorians think about disasters such as famines and epidemic diseases? What was the relationship between such cataclysmic events and literary forms, styles and genres? In what way was thinking about disasters also crucial to practices of governance? Does the legacy of such Victorian thinking still shape our contemporary responses to 'natural' disasters? This book seeks to answer such questions by looking at a wide range of administrative, medical, historical, journalistic and literary texts written about Britain's key imperial possession in the 19th-century – south Asia. In doing so, it expands our ideas about Victorian literature, just as it reshapes our definitions of 'natural' disasters themselves.

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee is a Reader at Warwick University, UK and is the author of Crime and Empire (2003), Postcolonial Environments (2010) and a wide range of other articles, reviews and edited books and journals. He was born in India and educated in Kolkata, Oxford and Cambridge. He has worked as a journalist and taught at Newcastle University, UK before his current appointment. He has been a regional judge for the Commonwealth Prize for Literature (Europe and Asia), and appeared on various arts and culture shows such as BBC's Late Review.