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"This is the first interdisciplinary literary-critical study of vivisection. It reveals how animal experimentation intrigued diverse writers, raised major representational issues, and seeped into the heart of nineteenth-century culture. It represents a landmark in nineteenth-century literature, animal studies, and history of science and emotions"--
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. Protest: 1. Forging literary connections; 2. Reading, feeling, acting; Part II. Reading Vivisectors: 3. Textual strategies: decoding the 'real' vivisector; 4. Visual strategies: medico-literary bodies; Part III. Representing Pain: 5. Non-human tellers and translations; 6. H. G. Wells on the possibilities of painlessness; Part IV. Writing as Vivisection: 7. Continental naturalism: observation and experiment; 8. Vivisection and British literary criticism; Conclusion.
About the author
Asha Hornsby researches the interplay between scientific medicine, public health anxieties, and Victorian culture. Following her AHRC-funded Ph.D. at UCL, she taught at the Universities of Nottingham and St Andrews. Having received a British Academy Postdoctoral Award (2024–26), she is pursuing a literary-critical study of nineteenth-century global seafaring and disease.
Summary
The nineteenth-century antivivisection movement was supported by a striking number of poets, authors, and playwrights who attended meetings, signed petitions, contributed funds, and lent their pens to the cause. Yet live animal experimentation also permeated the Victorian imagination and shaped British literary culture in ways that the movement against it did not anticipate and could not entirely control. This is the first sustained literary-critical study of the topic. It traces responses to the practice through an extensive corpus of canonical, popular, and ephemeral texts including newspapers, scientific books, and government documents. Asha Hornsby sheds light on the complex entanglement of art and science at the fin-de-siècle and explores how the representational and aesthetic preoccupations opened up by vivisection debates often sat uneasily alongside a socio-political commitment to animal protection. Despite efforts to present writing and vivisecting as rivalrous activities, author and experimenter, pen and scalpel, often resembled each other.
Foreword
The first interdisciplinary literary-critical study of vivisection, revealing a pervasive intrigue beyond mere concern with animal welfare.
