Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain

Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain PDF Author: James G. Paradis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802097456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grain is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age.

Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain

Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain PDF Author: James G. Paradis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802097456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grain is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age.

Samuel Butler against the Professionals

Samuel Butler against the Professionals PDF Author: David Gillott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351550179
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In the wake of the 2009 Darwin bicentenary, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) is becoming as well known for his public attack on Darwin's character and the basis of his scientific authority as for his novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. In the first monograph devoted to Butler's ideas for over twenty years, David Gillott offers a much-needed reappraisal of Butler's work and shows how Lamarckian ideas pervaded the whole of Butler's wide-ranging ouevre, and not merely his evolutionary theory. In particular, he argues that Lamarckism was the foundation on which Butler's attempt to undermine professional authority in a variety of disciplines was based. Samuel Butler against the Professionals provides new insight into a fascinating but often misunderstood writer, and on the surprisingly broad application of Lamarckian ideas in the decades following publication of the Origin of Species.

Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900

Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900 PDF Author: Martin Middeke
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110394219
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 788

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Book Description
Part I of this authoritative handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, social, philosophical, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel between 1830 and 1900. The essays offer a wide scope of aspects such as the Industrial Revolution, religion and secularisation, science, technology, medicine, evolution or the increasing mediatisation of the lifeworld. Part II, then, leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each of these chapters provides both historical and biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis. They also encourage further research as they look upon the work of the respective authors at issue from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.

We Are All Monsters

We Are All Monsters PDF Author: Andrew Mangham
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262372460
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
How the monsters of nineteenth-century literature and science came to define us. “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In We Are All Monsters, Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life-forms and processes. Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative. In works ranging from Comte de Buffon’s interrogations of humanity within natural history to Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory, and from Shelley’s artificial man to fin de siècle notions of body difference, Mangham expertly traces a persistent attempt to understand modern subjectivity through a range of biological and imaginary monsters. In a world that hides monstrosity behind theoretical and cultural representations that reinscribe its otherness, this enlightened book shows how innovative nineteenth-century thinkers dismantled the fictive idea of normality and provided a means of thinking about life in ways that check the reflexive tendency to categorize and divide.

English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914

English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914 PDF Author: Will Abberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107101166
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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

Ecological Form

Ecological Form PDF Author: Nathan K. Hensley
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823282139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental—and therefore political—knowledge. Moving from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance, the scientific treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book’s most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.

Strange Science

Strange Science PDF Author: Lara Pauline Karpenko
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472900773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The essays in Strange Science examine marginal, fringe, and unconventional forms of scientific inquiry, as well as their cultural representations, in the Victorian period. Although now relegated to the category of the pseudoscientific, fields like mesmerism and psychical research captured the imagination of the Victorian public. Conversely, many branches of science now viewed as uncontroversial, such as physics and botany, were often associated with unorthodox methods of inquiry. Whether ultimately incorporated into mainstream scientific thought or categorized by 21st century historians as pseudo- or even anti-scientific, these sciences generated conversation, enthusiasm, and controversy within Victorian society. To date, scholarship addressing Victorian pseudoscience tends to focus either on a particular popular science within its social context or on how mainstream scientific practice distinguished itself from more contested forms. Strange Science takes a different approach by placing a range of sciences in conversation with one another and examining the similar unconventional methods of inquiry adopted by both now-established scientific fields and their marginalized counterparts during the Victorian period. In doing so, Strange Science reveals the degree to which scientific discourse of this period was radically speculative, frequently attempting to challenge or extend the apparent boundaries of the natural world. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to scholars in the fields of Victorian literature, cultural studies, the history of the body, and the history of science.

The Literary 1880s

The Literary 1880s PDF Author: Penny Fielding
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107181909
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Explores the diverse forces that shaped developments in literature in the 1880s, an often overlooked literary decade.

Darwin: A Companion - With Iconographies By John Van Wyhe

Darwin: A Companion - With Iconographies By John Van Wyhe PDF Author: Paul Van Helvert
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811208220
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
'This is a book that required a great many research hours, the kind of volume you may be glad someone took the time to compile.'The Quarterly Review of Biology This is the ultimate guide to the life and work of Charles Darwin. The result of decades of research through a vast and daunting literature which is hard for beginners and experts alike to navigate, it brings together widely scattered facts including very many unknown to even the most ardent Darwin aficionados. It includes hundreds of new discoveries and corrections to the existing literature. It provides the most complete summaries of his publications, manuscripts, lifetime itinerary, finances, personal library, friends and colleagues, opponents, visitors to his home, anniversaries, hundreds of flora, fauna, monuments and places named after him and a host of other topics. Also included are the most complete lists (iconographies) ever created of illustrations of the Beagle, over 1000 portraits of Darwin, his wife and home as well as all known Darwin photographs, stamps and caricatures. The book is richly illustrated with 350 images, most previously unknown.

Novel Cultivations

Novel Cultivations PDF Author: Elizabeth Hope Chang
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813942497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Shortlisted for the Best Book Prize from the British Society of Literature and Science Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species—botanical and human—to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious expression in a number of fanciful genre texts, including mysteries, science fiction, and horror stories. Situated in a mid-Victorian moment of frenetic plant collecting from the far reaches of the British empire, Novel Cultivations recognizes plants as vital and sentient subjects that serve—often more so than people—as actors and narrative engines in the nineteenth-century novel. Conceptions of native and natural were decoupled by the revelation that nature was globally sourced, a disruption displayed in the plots of gardens as in those of novels. Elizabeth Chang examines here the agency asserted by plants with shrewd readings of a range of fictional works, from monstrous rhododendrons in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Mexican prickly pears in Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, to Algernon Blackwood’s hair-raising "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" and other obscure ecogothic tales. This provocative contribution to ecocriticism shows plants as buttonholes between fiction and reality, registering changes of form and content in both realms.