This Pivot engages with current debates about anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene to propose a reappraisal of the realist novel in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through three case studies, it argues for ‘human tissue’ as a conceptual tool for reading that brings together biology, literature and questions of layering. This new approach is shown to be especially salient to the Victorian period, when the application of ‘tissue’ to biology first emerges. The book is distinctive in bringing together theoretical concerns around realism and the Anthropocene – two major topics in literary criticism – and presenting a new methodology to approach this conjunction, demonstrated through original readings of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, and Emile Zola and two English-language writers he influenced (George Moore and Vernon Lee).
Author(s): Ben Moore
Series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 106
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: Introduction: Human Tissue
Human Nature, Fragility and Belatedness
Human Tissue: A Concept for Reading
Human Tissue in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter Outline
Chapter 2: Becoming-evolutionary?: Animal Transformations in Alton Locke
Alton’s Dream: The Collapse and Restoration of Self
Deleuze and Guattari I: Series, Structure and Desire
Deleuze and Guattari II: Becoming-animal and Becoming-molecular
Evolutionary Progress vs Death and Disruption
Machines, Assemblages and Haeccities
Becoming-Evolutionary
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Allegorical Realism and the Figure of the Human in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch
The Passions of the River
The Natural History of the Anthropocene
The Externalised Essence of Humanity: Feuerbach
Fragments, Strings and Scratches
Threads, Tissues and Layers
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Zola, Moore, Lee and the Vivisectional Novel
Zola’s Nauseating Kitchen
Le Ventre de Paris: The Fat and the Thin
The Market as Slaughterhouse
George Moore: The Outer Skin of Naturalism
Vernon Lee: The Moral Miasma of Zola
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Conclusion: The Primitive Tissue of Realism
Index
