Chapter 8 - Vivisection and British Literary Criticism

Summary

British reviewers often opposed the distasteful ‘physiological’ experiments of their European neighbours while simultaneously embracing laboratory principles and methods to dissect the practice of criticism. Chapter 8 surveys the newspapers and periodicals of the period to show that vivisectional terminology was remarkably sprawling in its applications and meanings. Experimental physiology’s modus operandi was used to shape and articulate key methodological and ideological principles emerging in late-Victorian literary-critical theory and practice. Namely, allusions to ‘vivisection’ expressed a growing professionalism and a shift from an ‘illustrative’ to a dispassionate ‘analytical’ mode, paralleling the trend towards ‘scientific’ historiography. Certain authors such as George Eliot, William Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë were persistently labelled ‘literary vivisectors’, and the chapter ends by arguing that romanticised notions of the sympathetic female author presented one obstacle to objective, ‘vivisectional’ fin-de-siècle literary criticism.