Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

Ferguson, Christine

doi:10.4324/9781315250861

Cited by 7 publications

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“…Drawing an analogy between types of texts and types of knowledge productively disrupts hierarchies, opening up critical space to consider the value of popular writing to literary and intellectual history. Philip Erchinger interrogates concepts of genre by approaching Victorian literary and scientific texts as "ways of knowing" that share both the "common medium" of 4 Extended analyses of Allen include Abberley (2018;2020), Morton (2005), Melchiori (2000), Ferguson (2006), Greenslade and Rodgers, eds. (2005), Lightman (2007), Stiles (2011), Pittard (2011), and Cowie (2000.…”

Section: Beth Millsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Weird and fantastic realism’: Science and Stories in the Work of Grant Allen

Mills¹

2021

VPFJ

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Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a well-known populariser of natural history who was widely recognised for his extensive knowledge of science and his ability to refashion complex ideas for general audiences. But his status as a popular writer, coupled with a lack of formal training, placed him at the margins of professional science and impeded his serious scientific ambitions. Although Allen tended to portray fiction-writing as an economic necessity, both contemporary and recent critics have noted stylistic innovations that place him within germinal popular genres of the fin de siècle. This paper aims to show that Allen’s contributions to late-Victorian popular literature derive in part from his negotiation of fiction and non-fiction genres. Focusing particularly on his experiments with the short story, it considers how and to what extent he distinguished scientific from literary writing, while revealing his views on plausibility in fiction to be more complex than is typically recognised. Little-studied reviews of Allen’s popular fiction suggest the wider contemporary impact of his experimentations. That critics recognised his style as unconventional endorses a reappraisal of his place within developments in late-Victorian popular literature.

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Section: Beth Millsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(2005), Lightman (2007), Stiles (2011), Pittard (2011), and Cowie (2000. On the relationship of Allen's fiction to specific scientific subjects, see, for example, Abberley (2018; 2020), Ferguson (2006), Parrinder (2005, Randolph (2005), Slaugh-Sanford (2012), and Stiles (2011.…”

Section: Beth Millsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Weird and fantastic realism’: Science and Stories in the Work of Grant Allen

Mills¹

2021

VPFJ

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“…Associated with continental linguistics, and seeking to distance itself from the earlier conjectural etymologies of Condillac and Lord Monboddo (Ferguson 2006, p. 21), comparative philology was popularised in the mid-nineteenth century by the lectures of Max Müller. Müller emphasised the new science's two underpinning premises: that language was constituted through sound (an inheritance from Herder's focus on the 'living breath' of language as opposed to the deadened written word, an idea itself dating back to Plato's Cratylus), and that it was organised 3 On the cultural implications of comparative philology, see Dowling (1986) and Ferguson (2006); on the development of philology in parallel to reconstructive sciences such as geology (and in turn their relation to detective fiction), see Frank (2003), particularly 9-18. according to laws independent of individuals and of representation. These principles, argues Dowling, became "twin foci for Victorian anxieties about the new order of language and the subversion of culture that order seemed to portend" (ibid., p. 62).…”

Section: Animal Voices: the Crisis Of Comparative Philologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Animal Voices: Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective and the Crimes of Animality

Pittard

2018

Humanities

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While previous readings of Catherine Louisa Pirkis' series The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894) have focused on Brooke's status as New Woman detective, this article considers the series in the context of Pirkis' own engagement with animal rights and anti-vivisection campaigns in the late nineteenth century. The discussion focuses on one Loveday Brooke story in particular, "The Murder at Troyte's Hill," arguing that Pirkis dramatises contemporary anti-vivisectionist rhetoric (that animal experimentation was not only scientifically flawed, but morally damaging, leading to human experimentation). Pirkis' fiction instead presents a number of contact zones in which human and animal identities are renegotiated, most significantly in the figure of Loveday Brooke herself. The article considers the representation of comparative philology in the story, as an emerging linguistic science which raised anxieties of cultural dissolution and which was often associated with the image of the vivisector. It concludes that the Pirkis stories demonstrate, anticipating Derrida, that to write of the animal in the nineteenth century is inevitably to write about crime, and vice versa; the animal is a perpetual presence in Victorian detective fiction.

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Evolution and Victorian fiction

Schmitt¹

2014

Evolution and Victorian Culture

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Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

Cited by 7 publications

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‘Weird and fantastic realism’: Science and Stories in the Work of Grant Allen

‘Weird and fantastic realism’: Science and Stories in the Work of Grant Allen

Animal Voices: Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective and the Crimes of Animality

Evolution and Victorian fiction

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