We Are All Monsters
How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us
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- US$19.99
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- US$19.99
출판사 설명
How the monsters of nineteenth-century literature and science came to define us.
“Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In We Are All Monsters, Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life-forms and processes. Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative.
In works ranging from Comte de Buffon’s interrogations of humanity within natural history to Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory, and from Shelley’s artificial man to fin de siècle notions of body difference, Mangham expertly traces a persistent attempt to understand modern subjectivity through a range of biological and imaginary monsters. In a world that hides monstrosity behind theoretical and cultural representations that reinscribe its otherness, this enlightened book shows how innovative nineteenth-century thinkers dismantled the fictive idea of normality and provided a means of thinking about life in ways that check the reflexive tendency to categorize and divide.
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In this clever study, Mangham (The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy), a Victorian literature professor at the University of Reading, explores how science and literature changed understandings of human difference during the 19th century. He contends that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, and Lucas Malet's The History of Sir Richard Calmady promoted the growing consensus that "monsters" (those once viewed as having been "born with at least one permanent physiological defect") reflect the natural processes of evolution. The author chronicles the development of scientific opinion over the course of the 19th century, including pre-Darwinian ideas about the capacity of species to change over time. Shelley, Dickens, and Malet, Mangham argues, contributed to the understanding of "monstrosity" as the product of natural mutations through their depictions of "abnormal" characters and their formal inventiveness, which signaled that the novel was subject to endless permutations in a manner analogous to human difference. There's as much science on offer as there is literary criticism, and Mangham proves he's more than up to the challenge of teasing out the surprising overlap between the disciplines, even if he overreaches in his claim that fiction "cocreated" changes in the scientific understanding of human difference. The result is a fascinating marriage of scientific history and literary analysis.
