Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

ISBN-13: 9781108725767 / Miękka / 2023 / 309 str.

Will (University of Sussex) Abberley

Opis

The book reveals how Victorians biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations.

Recenzje

'Mimicry and Display fits nicely within the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series, which has done so much to expand the range of high-quality scholarship on topics related to science and nature, technology, environment, and medicine. The chapters on Allen, Hardy, and late-century cultural criticism are especially good, and the book displays how widely and deeply scientific accounts of mimicry and camouflage in the natural world reverberated through Victorian literary culture.' Jonathan Smith, Victorian Studies

Spis treści

Introduction. Adaptive appearance in nineteenth-century culture; 1. Seeing things: art, nature and science in representations of crypsis; 2. Divine displays: Charles Kingsley, hermeneutic natural theology and the problem of adaptive appearance; 3. Criminal chameleons: the evolution of deceit in Grant Allen's fiction; 4. Darwin's little ironies: evolution and the ethics of appearance in Thomas Hardy's fiction; 5. Blending in and standing out I: crypsis versus individualism in fin-de-siècle cultural criticism; 6. Blending in and standing out II: mimicry, display and identity politics in the literary activism of Israel Zangwill and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Conclusion. Adaptive appearance and cultural theory.