Book contents
- Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture
- Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century Literature and culture
- Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Protest
- Part II Reading Vivisectors
- Part III Representing Pain
- Chapter 5 Non-human Tellers and Translations
- Chapter 6 H. G. Wells on the Possibilities of Painlessness
- Part IV Writing as Vivisection
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Chapter 6 - H. G. Wells on the Possibilities of Painlessness
from Part III - Representing Pain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2025
- Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture
- Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century Literature and culture
- Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Protest
- Part II Reading Vivisectors
- Part III Representing Pain
- Chapter 5 Non-human Tellers and Translations
- Chapter 6 H. G. Wells on the Possibilities of Painlessness
- Part IV Writing as Vivisection
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Chapter 6 returns to H. G. Wells to offer a fuller account of this writer’s longstanding fascination with animal experimentation, a practice he supported. Analysis of The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), short stories, and essays reveal this author’s investment in contemporary scientific debates surrounding the thorny issues surrounding non-human pain introduced in Chapter 5. Despite differences in genre and tone, the selected texts each exploit the uneasy relationship between injury, experience, and expression to raise compelling questions about pain’s purpose and limits. The period’s vivisection debates were an important and productive context for Wells who capitalised on the ambivalence they produced, undermined the generic expectations of writings about the subject, and considered whether literary and linguistic methods could uniquely capture – or even solve – the problem of pain.
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- Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture , pp. 157 - 182Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025