Beastly Journeys Travel and Transformation at the fin de siécle / Tim Youngs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Youngs, Tim, 1961- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--History and criticism.

Literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (232 pages)

Other Title:

Knowledge Unlatched.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool, UK : Liverpool University Press, 2013.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

A critical exploration of travel, animals and shape-changing in fin de siécle literature. Bats, beetles, wolves, butterflies, bulls, panthers, apes, leopards and spiders are among the countless creatures that crowd the pages of literature of the late nineteenth century. Whether in Gothic novels, science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, journalism, political discourse, realism or naturalism, the line between the human and the animal becomes blurred. Beastly Journeys examines these bestial transformations across a range of well-known and less familiar texts and shows how they are provoked not only by the mutations of Darwinism but by social and economic shifts that have been lost in retellings and readings of them. The physical alterations described by George Gissing, George MacDonald, Arthur Machen, Arthur Morrison, W.T. Stead, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and many of their contemporaries, are responses to changes in the social body as Britain underwent a series of social and economic crises. Metaphors of travel- social, spatial, temporal, mythical and psychological- keep these stories on the move, confusing literary genres along with the indeterminacy of physical shape that they relate. Beastly Journeys will appeal to anyone interested in the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and its contexts and especially to those interested in the fin de siécle and in metaphors of travel, animals and shape-changing. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

Contents:

1 City Creatures 39

2 The Bat and the Beetle 74

3 Morlocks, Martians, and Beast-People 107

4 'Beast and man so mixty: The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald 140

5 Oscar Wilde: 'an unclean beast' 165.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Local Notes:

Knowledge Unlatched Pilot Collection

BiblioBoard internal publisher id: 103424

ISBN:

9781846319587

OCLC:

875673696

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access