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Beastly Journeys : Travel and Transformation at the fin de siécle

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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.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Liverpool English Texts and Studies

Call Number

809 YOU b

Publisher

: Liverpool University Press., 2013

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781781386071

Classification

809

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

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Subject(s)

Literary Criticism

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Tim Youngs

Other Information

Cataloger

Kholif Basri

Source

-

Validator

maya

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