1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910132510703321

Autore

Youngs Tim <1961->

Titolo

Beastly journeys : travel and transformation at the fin de siècle / / Tim Youngs [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Liverpool, : Liverpool University Press, 2013

Liverpool : , : Liverpool University Press, , 2013

ISBN

1-78138-089-9

1-78138-552-1

1-78138-607-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (x, 225 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Liverpool English texts and studies ; ; 63

Disciplina

820.935509034

Soggetti

English literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Literature and society - Great Britain - History - 19th century

Animals in literature

Travel in literature

Shapeshifting

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 11 Aug 2017).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-219) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: the unchaining of the beast --City creatures --The bat and the beetle --Morlocks, martians, and beast-people --'Beast and man so mixty': the fairy tales of George MacDonald --Oscar Wilde: 'an unclean beast'.

Sommario/riassunto

Bats, beetles, wolves, butterflies, bulls, panthers, apes, leopards and spiders are among the countless creatures that crowd the pages of literature of the late nineteenth century. Whether in Gothic novels, science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, journalism, political discourse, realism or naturalism, the line between the human and the animal becomes blurred. Beastly Journeys examines these bestial transformations across a range of well-known and less familiar texts and shows how they are provoked not only by the mutations of Darwinism but by social and economic shifts that have been lost in retellings and readings of them. The physical alterations described by George Gissing, George MacDonald, Arthur Machen, Arthur Morrison, W.T. Stead, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and many of their



contemporaries, are responses to changes in the social body as Britain underwent a series of social and economic crises. Metaphors of travel - social, spatial, temporal, mythical and psychological - keep these stories on the move, confusing literary genres along with the indeterminacy of physical shape that they relate. Beastly Journeys will appeal to anyone interested in the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and its contexts and especially to those interested in the fin de siècle and in metaphors of travel, animals and shape-changing.