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
- Chapter 3 Textual Strategies
- Chapter 4 Visual Strategies
- Part III Representing Pain
- Part IV Writing as Vivisection
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Chapter 4 - Visual Strategies
Medico-Literary Bodies
from Part II - Reading Vivisectors
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
- Chapter 3 Textual Strategies
- Chapter 4 Visual Strategies
- Part III Representing Pain
- Part IV Writing as Vivisection
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
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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- Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture , pp. 102 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025