16406

SoSe 23: Monsters after Darwin: Reading the Victorian Gothic

Stephan Karschay

Hinweise für Studierende

Sprache: Die Seminarsprache ist Englisch. Studienleistungen: Regelmäßige und aktive Teilnahme, Lektüre aller im Seminar diskutierten Texte, seminarbegleitende ... Lesen Sie weiter

Kommentar

The Victorian age (ca.1830 – ca.1900) saw the rise of science as we know it today. Before the nineteenth century, scientific concerns were negotiated in the field of ‘natural ... Lesen Sie weiter

The Victorian age (ca.1830 – ca.1900) saw the rise of science as we know it today. Before the nineteenth century, scientific concerns were negotiated in the field of ‘natural philosophy’, and, conversely, anything that required special skills (such as boxing) could be referred to as a ‘science’. From the 1830s onwards, however, scientists attempted to set themselves apart from philosophers and clerics and established individual scientific disciplines with their own specialised, and highly ‘modern’, forms of knowledge. Thus, the nineteenth century saw groundbreaking developments in the realms of biology, geology, physics, chemistry and psychology, many of which challenged and ultimately undermined the traditional authority of religion in Britain and Europe. In cultural terms, it could be argued, no scientific ‘theory’ had a more significant impact than Charles Darwin’s writings on evolution, which he developed most fully in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin’s uncomfortable claim that humanity shared a common ancestor with other mammals dovetailed with the even more disquieting suggestion that humanity would not necessarily evolve further but might under certain conditions regress to a less developed version of itself. It is certainly no coincidence, then, that authors writing in Darwin’s wake produced some of the most memorable monsters in the history of British literature. In the abhuman shape of the monster, Victorian readers were confronted with their own anxieties (and desires) about their own humanity as if ‘in a glass darkly’. The perceived threats of racial degeneration, psychological disintegration, pathological sexualisation and reverse colonisation were all inscribed into the monstrous fictions of the late-Victorian Gothic, producing bodies which can be read as the fin de siècle’s abject others. In this seminar, we will be interested in the cultural work which fictional monsters perform – both through their textual representation and their critical interpretation. Furthermore, we will investigate the myriad ways in which Gothic fiction presented the bygone past (historical, mythological and anthropological) as a perpetual source of terror for the present as well as the future. We will examine several Gothic monsters and situate them in their relevant cultural contexts so that specific emphasis will be placed on the various discourses which helped to produce the monsters of the fin de siècle (experimental medicine, criminal anthropology, psychology and sexology), and which can all be linked to Darwin’s ideas.

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Literaturhinweise

Zur Anschaffung: Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan [1894]. Victorian Gothic Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). [ISBN: 978-0199538874] Stevenson, ... Lesen Sie weiter

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Freie Universität Berlin

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