| dc.description.abstract | This thesis uncovers material and metaphorical bodily encounters with postal infrastructures in the nineteenth-century. As the Post Office expanded in the nineteenth century, particularly with the advent of uniform penny postage in 1840, infrastructures, such as sorting houses, Travelling Post Offices and steam packets, had a profound impact on British Victorians’ engagements with and imaginings of the Post Office. In this thesis, I place original emphasis on ‘postal bodies’, demonstrating that postal infrastructures were embodied by both those who worked on and used them. In doing so, I intervene in and complicate scholarship that has invested in the Victorian postal mythology of speed, mechanisation and disembodiment, and rethink the role of one of the key institutions of Victorian Britain in the literary imagination. By reinserting the cultural importance of the postal body into the scholarly picture, ‘Postal Bodies: Imagining Communication Infrastructures in Nineteenth-Century Literature’ argues that these infrastructures were interactive and shaped by the messiness of bodily exchange. Underpinned by literary readings, non-literary sources, and archival research, as well as theories of infrastructures and mobility, I demonstrate that these expanding postal infrastructures shaped, and were shaped by, the bodies that facilitated and utilised them. As the complex infrastructures of postal exchange were employed by nineteenth-century authors, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Hesba Stretton, they become imagined, negotiated, and subverted, through postal bodies. This thesis places the question of embodied representation at the centre of its analysis, and, in doing so, provides new insights into the multiplicity and heterogeneity of embodied experiences of the mail, from labour intensive sorting and mail running, to rapid transit on the mail train and international steam packet lines. | en_GB |
