Title Mimicry and display in Victorian literary culture : nature, science and the nineteenth-century imagination / Will Abberley

Published Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2020 ©2020

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Description 1 online resource (vii, 293 pages) : illustrations Series Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 123 Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; v. 123. Contents Introduction: adaptive appearance in nineteenth-century culture -- Seeing things: art, nature and science in representations of crypsis -- Divine Displays: Charles Kingsley, hermeneutic natural theology and the problem of adaptive appearance -- Criminal chameleons: the evolution of deceit in Grant Allen's fiction -- Darwin's little ironies: the ethics of appearance in Thomas Hardy's fiction -- Blending in and standing out I: crypsis versus individualism in Fin-Siècle cultural criticism -- 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 Summary "Mimicry and Display reveals how Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. The book argues that studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation as much as hard facts. It contends that this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings and inspired literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. The book discusses a wide range of writers, juxtaposing scientists such as Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace with the art critic John Ruskin. It traces a discourse of 'adaptive appearance' that generated new understandings of deception through the crime fiction of Grant Allen and pastoral narratives of Thomas Hardy. Mimicry and Display suggests that the biology of appearance reacted with notions of individualism and originality in the rhetoric of cultural critics such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. It further shows how tropes of adaptive appearance infused representations of sexual and racial identity in the literary activism of Israel Zangwill and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The conclusion explores the implications of these findings for current discussions in cultural theory"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on June 01, 2020) Subject English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism Literature and science -- Great Britain Imitation in literature. Nature in literature. English literature Imitation in literature Literature and science Nature in literature Great Britain Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book LC no. 2019040880 ISBN 9781108770026 1108770029

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