1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910510544903321

Autore

Taylor-Pirie Emilie

Titolo

Empire Under the Microscope : Parasitology and the British Literary Imagination, 1885–1935 / / by Emilie Taylor-Pirie

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2022

ISBN

9783030847173

3030847179

Edizione

[1st ed. 2022.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (303 pages)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, , 2634-6443

Classificazione

FIC000000LIT024040LIT024050

Disciplina

823.8093561

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 19th century

Literature, Modern - 20th century

Fiction

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Twentieth-Century Literature

Fiction Literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

1. Introduction: Stories of Science and Empire -- 2. The Knights of Science: Medicine and Mythology -- 3. Expeditions into ‘Central Man’: Imperial Romance, Tropical Medicine, and Heroic Masculinity -- 4. Detecting the Diagnosis: Parasitology, Crime Fiction, and the British Medical Gaze -- 5. Imperial Aetiologies: Violence, Sleeping Sickness, and the Colonial Encounter -- 6. Microbial Empires: Active Transmission Strategies and Postcolonial Critique -- 7. Epilogue: Pan Narrans.

Sommario/riassunto

This open access book considers science and empire, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Using British Nobel laureate Ronald Ross (1857-1932) and his colleagues as access points to a wider professional culture, Empire Under the Microscope explores the cultural history of parasitology and its relationships with the literary and historical imagination between 1885 and 1935. Emilie Taylor-Pirie examines a wealth of archival material including medical lectures, scientific publications, popular biography, and personal and



professional correspondence, alongside novels, poems, newspaper articles, and political speeches, to excavate the shared vocabularies of literature and medicine. She demonstrates how forms such as poetry and biography; genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction; and modes such as adventure and the Gothic, together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors, were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation.From Ancient Greece, to King Arthur’s Knights, to the detective work of Sherlock Holmes, parasitologists manipulated literary and historical forms of knowledge in their professional self-fashioning to create a modern mythology that has a visible legacy in relationships between science and society today. Emilie Taylor-Pirie is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. She has a BSc in Biology and higher degrees in the humanities.