Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture - Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination

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

List of contents

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.

About the author

Will Abberley is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Sussex. His other books are English Fiction and the Evolution of Language 1850–1914 (2015) and Underwater Worlds: Submerged Visions in Science and Culture (2018). He is a BBC New Generation Thinker and Philip Leverhulme Prize recipient.

Summary

Throwing new light on how Victorians conceptualized identity, deception, originality and the relations between sciences and the arts, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture offers fresh angles on canonical authors and texts. It will appeal to scholars and students of literature and history, and general readers interested in cultural history and history of science.

Product details

• Authors: Will Abberley, Will (University of Sussex) Abberley, Abberley Will
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2020
• EAN: 9781108477598
• ISBN: 978-1-108-47759-8
• No. of pages: 308
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteent; Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; Theory of art, History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, History of Art, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary theory