Language Science And Popular Fiction In The Victorian Fin De Si Cle

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Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.

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Genre : Literary Criticism
Author : Christine Ferguson
Publisher : Routledge
Release : 2017-03-02
File : 166 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781351923323


The Palgrave Handbook Of Twentieth And Twenty First Century Literature And Science

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This handbook illustrates the evolution of literature and science, in collaboration and contestation, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essays it gathers question the charged rhetoric that pits science against the humanities while also demonstrating the ways in which the convergence of literary and scientific approaches strengthens cultural analyses of colonialism, race, sex, labor, state formation, and environmental destruction. The broad scope of this collection explores the shifting relations between literature and science that have shaped our own cultural moment, sometimes in ways that create a problematic hierarchy of knowledge and other times in ways that encourage fruitful interdisciplinary investigations, innovative modes of knowledge production, and politically charged calls for social justice. Across units focused on epistemologies, techniques and methods, ethics and politics, and forms and genres, the chapters address problems ranging across epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnology, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, physics, and computational and surveillance technologies. Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

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Genre : Literary Criticism
Author : Neel Ahuja
Publisher : Springer Nature
Release : 2020-11-26
File : 688 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9783030482442


Cultivating Belief

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This book explores how a group of Victorian liberal writers that included George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold became attracted to new theories of religion as a function of race and ethnicity. Since the early modern period, British liberals had typically constructed religion as a zone of personal belief that defined modern individuality and interiority. During the 1860s, however, Eliot, Arnold, and other literary liberals began to claim that religion could actually do the most for the modern self when it came as a kind of involuntary inheritance. Stimulated by the emerging science of anthropology, they imagined that religious experiences embedded in race or ethnicity could render the self heterogeneous, while the individual who insisted upon selecting his or her own beliefs would become narrow and parochial. By rethinking the grounds of religion, this book argues, these writers were ultimately trying to shift liberal individualism away from a classical Protestant liberalism that celebrated interiority and agency and toward one that valorized eclecticism and the capacity to keep multiple values in play. More broadly, their work offers us a new picture of secularization, not as a process of religious decline, but as the reinscription of religion as an ordinary feature of human life—like art, or politics, or sex—whose function could be debated.

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Genre : Literary Criticism
Author : Sebastian Lecourt
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Release : 2018-04-05
File : 240 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9780192540584


The Invisible Man

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'The man's become inhuman ... He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.' One night in the depths of winter, a bizarre and sinister stranger wrapped in bandages and eccentric clothing arrives in a remote English village. His peculiar, secretive activities in the room he rents spook the locals. Speculation about his identity becomes horror and disbelief when the villagers discover that, beneath his disguise, he is invisible. Griffin, as the man is called, is an embittered scientist who is determined to exploit his extraordinary gifts, developed in the course of brutal self-experimentation, in order to conduct a Reign of Terror on the sleepy inhabitants of England. As the police close in on him, he becomes ever more desperate and violent. In this pioneering novella, subtitled 'A Grotesque Romance', Wells combines comedy, both farcical and satirical, and tragedy - to superbly unsettling effect. Since its publication in 1897, The Invisible Man has haunted not only popular culture (in particular cinema) but also the greatest and most experimental novels of the twentieth century.

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Genre : Fiction
Author : H. G. Wells
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Release : 2016-12-22
File : 193 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9780191007200


The Palgrave Encyclopedia Of Victorian Women S Writing

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Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

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Genre : Literary Criticism
Author : Lesa Scholl
Publisher : Springer Nature
Release : 2022-12-15
File : 1753 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9783030783181


English Fiction And The Evolution Of Language 1850 1914

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Explores how Victorian fiction and science imagined the evolution of language, from primordial noise to modern English.

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Genre : Fiction
Author : Will Abberley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Release : 2015-05-21
File : 249 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781107101166


The Early Fiction Of H G Wells

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This book explores the relationship between H.G. Wells's scientific romances and the discourses of science in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century. It investigates how Wells utilizes his early fiction to participate in a range of topical scientific disputes and, increasingly, as a means to instigate social reform.

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Genre : Fiction
Author : S. McLean
Publisher : Springer
Release : 2009-04-17
File : 247 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9780230236639


Mimicry And Display In Victorian Literary Culture

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The book reveals how Victorians biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations.

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Genre : Art
Author : Will Abberley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Release : 2020-06-11
File : 311 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781108477598


Evolution And Victorian Culture

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These essays examine the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences.

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Genre : Art
Author : Bernard V. Lightman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Release : 2014-05-29
File : 347 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781107028425


The Island Of Doctor Moreau

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'The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals, humanised animals...' A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain, and by his encounters with half-bestial creatures, Edward slowly realises his danger and the extremes of the Doctor's experiments. Saturated in pain and disgust, suffused with grotesque and often unbearable images of torture and bodily mutilation, The Island of Doctor Moreau is unquestionably a shocking novel. It is also a serious, and highly knowledgeable, philosophical engagement with Wells's times, with their climate of scientific openness and advancement, but also their anxieties about the ethical nature of scientific discoveries, and their implications for religion. Darryl Jones's introduction places the book in both its scientific and literary context; with the Origin of Species and Gulliver's Travels, and argues that The Island of Doctor Moreau is, like all of Wells's best fiction, is fundamentally a novel of ideas

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Genre : Fiction
Author : H. G. Wells
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Release : 2017-04-06
File : 177 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9780191007187