Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theorys implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.Kept from All Contagion explores the surprising social effects of germ theory in the late nineteenth century. Connecting groups of authors rarely studied in tandem by highlighting their shared interest in changing interpersonal relationships in the wake of germ theory this book takes a surprising and refreshing stance on studies in medicine and literature.Each chapter focuses on a different disease discussing the different social policies or dilemmas that arose from new understandings in the 1860s1890s that these diseases were contagious. The chapters pair these sociohistorical considerations with robust literary analyses that assess the ways authors as diverse as Thomas Hardy Henrik Ibsen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon among others grappled with these ideas and their various impacts upon different human relationshipsmarital filial and social.Through the trifocal structure of each chapter microbial relational and sociopolitical the book excavates previously overlooked connections between literary texts that insist upon the lifegiving importance of community engagementthe very thing that seemed threatening in the wake of germ theorys revelations. Germ theory seemed to promote selfprotection via isolation the authors covered in Kept from All Contagion resist such tacit biopolitical implications. Instead as Kari Nixon shows they repeatedly demonstrate vitalizing interpersonal interactions in spite ofand often because oftheir contamination with disease thus completely upending both the ways Victorians and presentday literary scholars have tended to portray and interpret purity.