Vivisection and late-Victorian literary culture / Asha Hornsby, University of St Andrews.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hornsby, Asha, 1993- author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 152.

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 152

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Vivisection in literature.

Animals in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 334 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

The nineteenth-century antivivisection movement was supported by a striking number of poets, authors, and playwrights who attended meetings, signed petitions, contributed funds, and lent their pens to the cause. Yet live animal experimentation also permeated the Victorian imagination and shaped British literary culture in ways that the movement against it did not anticipate and could not entirely control. This is the first sustained literary-critical study of the topic. It traces responses to the practice through an extensive corpus of canonical, popular, and ephemeral texts including newspapers, scientific books, and government documents. Asha Hornsby sheds light on the complex entanglement of art and science at the fin-de-siècle and explores how the representational and aesthetic preoccupations opened up by vivisection debates often sat uneasily alongside a socio-political commitment to animal protection. Despite efforts to present writing and vivisecting as rivalrous activities, author and experimenter, pen and scalpel, often resembled each other.

Contents:

Protest. Forging literary connections

Reading, feeling, acting

Reading vivisectors. Textual strategies: decoding the 'real' vivisector

Visual strategies: medico-literary bodies

Representing pain. Non-human tellers and translations

H. G. Wells on the possibilities of painlessness

Writing as vivisection. Continental naturalism: observation and experiment

Vivisection and British literary criticism.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 28 Jan 2025).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781009503556

1009503553

9781009503518

1009503510

9781009503532

1009503537