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Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination by Will Abberley (University of Sussex) at Abbey's Bookshop,
Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination...
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Will Abberley (University of Sussex)

Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture

Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination

Will Abberley (University of Sussex)

$43.95

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Hardback

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English
Cambridge University Press
22 June 2023
Theory of art; History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900; Literary theory; Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.
By:  
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Weight:   451g
ISBN:   9781108725767
ISBN 10:   1108725767
Series:   Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Pages:   309
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Introduction. Adaptive appearance in nineteenth-century culture; 1. Seeing things: art, nature and science in representations of crypsis; 2. Divine displays: Charles Kingsley, hermeneutic natural theology and the problem of adaptive appearance; 3. Criminal chameleons: the evolution of deceit in Grant Allen's fiction; 4. Darwin's little ironies: evolution and the ethics of appearance in Thomas Hardy's fiction; 5. Blending in and standing out I: crypsis versus individualism in fin-de-siècle cultural criticism; 6. Blending in and standing out II: mimicry, display and identity politics in the literary activism of Israel Zangwill and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Conclusion. Adaptive appearance and cultural theory.

Will Abberley is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Sussex. His other books are English Fiction and the Evolution of Language 1850–1914 (2015) and Underwater Worlds: Submerged Visions in Science and Culture (2018). He is a BBC New Generation Thinker and Philip Leverhulme Prize recipient.

Reviews for Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination

'Mimicry and Display does something rather wonderful: while you'll read Victorian and Edwardian literature from a new perspective, you'll also never see nature in quite the same way again.' Catherine Charlwood, British Association for Victorian Studies Newsletter 'This volume provides a cultural history of crypsis, an evolutionary phenomenon in which organisms protect themselves by modifying their appearance to hide within an environment or copy the features of more dominant organisms. Recommended.' M. C. Cohen, Choice 'Mimicry and Display fits nicely within the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series, which has done so much to expand the range of high-quality scholarship on topics related to science and nature, technology, environment, and medicine. The chapters on Allen, Hardy, and late-century cultural criticism are especially good, and the book displays how widely and deeply scientific accounts of mimicry and camouflage in the natural world reverberated through Victorian literary culture.' Jonathan Smith, Victorian Studies


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