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Informationen zum Autor Andrew Mangham is Professor of Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Reading, UK. He is the author of The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature , Medicine, and Political Economy , Dickens’s Forensic Realism , and Violent Women and Sensation Fiction . Klappentext "How the idea of monstrosity, as "other" in critical research, was central to nineteenth-century scientific understandings of "natural" or "normal" biology"-- Zusammenfassung How the monsters of nineteenth-century literature and science came to define us. “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In We Are All Monsters , Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life-forms and processes. Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative. In works ranging from Comte de Buffon’s interrogations of humanity within natural history to Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory, and from Shelley’s artificial man to fin de siècle notions of body difference, Mangham expertly traces a persistent attempt to understand modern subjectivity through a range of biological and imaginary monsters. In a world that hides monstrosity behind theoretical and cultural representations that reinscribe its otherness, this enlightened book shows how innovative nineteenth-century thinkers dismantled the fictive idea of normality and provided a means of thinking about life in ways that check the reflexive tendency to categorize and divide. Inhaltsverzeichnis Notes xi Introduction 1 1 Monstrous Germs and Perpetual Formation 25 2 "Monster That I Am": Frankenstein 's Filthy Creation 61 3 Arrested Developments and Aborted Archetypes 95 4 "Fantastic and Monkey-Like": Dickens's Curiosities 127 5 Recapitulations, Leaps, and Memories 159 6 Lucas Malet's "Faculty of Actualizing" 191 Coda: Modern Difference 227 Acknowledgments 241 Glossary 243 Notes 247 Bibliography 291 Index 319...
