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Medico-Literary Bodies
from Part II - Reading Vivisectors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2025
Chapter 4 develops readings of Collins, Berdoe, and Hadwen’s novels, and introduces two others: Ouida’s Toxin: A Sketch (1895) and H. G. Wells’s scientific novella The Invisible Man (1897). The preoccupation with legibility extends beyond the textual in literatures of vivisection; by figuratively re-casting bodies as text and by encouraging readers to assume a keen but sympathetic gaze concerned with legible surfaces, these works forward ways of looking allied with alternative sciences such as physiognomy, anthroposcopy, and psychology. Ultimately, however, fictional vivisectors remain simultaneously transparent and opaque. Their powerfully returned gaze is marked by a paradoxical combination of clinical detachment and zealous absorption in the experimental subject in whom they inscribe their own meanings. The greatest threat posed by fictional vivisectors, the chapter argues, is not only that they themselves are unreadable, but that they might make others so too.
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