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Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

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Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle Synopsis

Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9781138262805
Publication date: 19th October 2016
Author: Christine Ferguson
Publisher: Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis Ltd
Format: Paperback
Pagination: 190 pages
Series: The Nineteenth Century Series
Genres: Literary studies: general
Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900