Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture

Auteur

Asha Hornsby researches the interplay between scientific medicine, public health anxieties, and Victorian culture. Following her AHRC-funded Ph.D. at UCL, she taught at the Universities of Nottingham and St Andrews. Having received a British Academy Postdoctoral Award (2024-26), she is pursuing a literary-critical study of nineteenth-century global seafaring and disease.

Texte du rabat

This is the first interdisciplinary literary-critical study of vivisection. It reveals how animal experimentation intrigued diverse writers, raised major representational issues, and seeped into the heart of nineteenth-century culture. It represents a landmark in nineteenth-century literature, animal studies, and history of science and emotions.

Contenu

Introduction; Part I. Protest: 1. Forging literary connections; 2. Reading, feeling, acting; Part II. Reading Vivisectors: 3. Textual strategies: decoding the 'real' vivisector; 4. Visual strategies: medico-literary bodies; Part III. Representing Pain: 5. Non-human tellers and translations; 6. H. G. Wells on the possibilities of painlessness; Part IV. Writing as Vivisection: 7. Continental naturalism: observation and experiment; 8. Vivisection and British literary criticism; Conclusion.