Metropolitan Modernism, Venereal Disease and Social Hygiene, 1899-1945 (360G-Wellcome-223442_Z_21_Z)

Following the lapse of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the late nineteenth century - legislation that allowed for the routine inspection of prostitutes in order to reduce the rates of STDs - rising rates of venereal disease created, by the outbreak of war in 1914, an atmosphere of widespread "sex panic" that associated the disease with "moral" infection, particularly in metropolitan locales. My research proposes that the venereal disease epidemic of the early twentieth century was a significant medical and cultural event of particular concern to literary modernists in and around the city, including Joyce, Woolf, Eliot and Pound, and Lawrence, and activated a nexus of interrelated concerns such as anxieties surrounding birth control, prostitution, and non-procreative intercourse. This project will demonstrate how the eugenic language of social hygiene influenced modernist aesthetic strategies and suggest that literary modernism itself contributed to emerging ideas of sexual health by reflecting contemporary fears of illness and contamination. In doing so, it will deepen our understandings of the place of the literary in the production of medical knowledge at this time, and examine the crucial role of cultural forms in the dissemination and transmission of public health discourse in the early twentieth century.