Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle
By: Stephan Karschay
Series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 295
ISBN-13: 9781137450326
Subjects: Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English; History and criticism; Literature and science; Degeneration in literature; English fiction; LITERARY CRITICISM / General; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; LITERARY CRITICISM / Gothic & Romance; LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory
Description: "This exciting new study looks at figures of degeneration and deviance in nineteenth-century science and late-Victorian Gothic fiction. The questions it raises are as relevant today as they were at the nineteenth century's fin de siècle: What constitutes the norm from which a deviation has occurred? When is a variation of the norm pronounced enough to qualify as 'pathological'? What exactly does it mean to be 'normal' or 'abnormal', and what happens if individuals find themselves on the 'wrong' side of the divide? Stephan Karschay addresses these questions through extensive readings of works by scientists such as Darwin, Lombroso, Maudsley, and Krafft-Ebing, and the most famous Gothic novels of R. L. Stevenson, Arthur Machen, Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh, Oscar Wilde and Marie Corelli"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 274-288) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: Acknowledgements1.Introduction2.Degeneration and the Victorian Sciences3.Detecting the Degenerate: Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan4.Othering the Degenerate: Bram Stoker's Dracula and Richard Marsh's The Beetle5.Normalising the Degenerate: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan6.ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex.