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It’s a truism to say that the Victorian age was a period of rapid technological and social change. It was also a period when science, increasingly, posited proofs for the unseen, from bacteria to mental illness to sexual orientation. Scientific discoveries and debates were cause for anxiety, as well as excitement. Whether through fictional scientists or science fiction, literature could be a place to explore society’s complex relationships to scientific change.
Podcaster: Lucy
Further Reading
Fiction Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847). Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859). Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897). H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897). Non-Fiction Sean Brady, ed. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) and Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Anna Clark, “The Rhetoric of Masculine Citizenship: Concepts and Representations in Modern Western Political Culture.” In Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture, edited by Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and Anna Clark, 1-22, Palgrave Macmillan, (2007). Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920, University of California Press, (1994). Michael Davis, “Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology.” Journal of Victorian Culture 11:2 (2006): 207-25. Michael S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society, Yale University Press, (1997). Christopher E. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization, and the Body, Palgrave Macmillan, (2008). Roger Luckhurst, “Introduction to The Woman in White.” The Novel 1832-1880. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, Basic Books, (1964). Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy. Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle, Penguin Books, (1990). Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com) Leave a Reply. |