This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the “limit cases” regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries of knowledge. These cases cast troubling and distorted shadows on the culture, throwing into relief the values, vested interests, and power relations regarding the construction of embodied life and consciousness that underpinned the understanding of what it was to be alive in the long nineteenth century. Ranging over a period from the...

Women, Science and Fiction Revisitedis an analysis of selected science fiction novels and short stories written by women over the past hundred years from the point of view of their engagement with how science writes the world. Beginning with Charlotte Perkins Gilman'sHerland(1918) and ending with N K Jemisin'sThe City We Became(2020), Debra Benita Shaw explores the re-imagination of gender and race that characterises women's literary crafting of new worlds. Along the way, she introduces new readings of classics like Ursula Le Guin'sThe Left Hand of Darknessand Margaret Atwood'sThe Handmaid's...

This Pivot engages with current debates about anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene to propose a reappraisal of the realist novel in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through three case studies, it argues for ‘human tissue’ as a conceptual tool for reading that brings together biology, literature and questions of layering. This new approach is shown to be especially salient to the Victorian period, when the application of ‘tissue’ to biology first emerges. The book is distinctive in bringing together theoretical concerns around realism and the Anthropocene – two major...