Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the fin de siecle ISBN: 9781781380895 Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Liverpool University Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited Subjects: Literary Studies (19th Century);
Bats, beetles, wolves, butterflies, bulls, panthers, apes, leopards and spiders are among the countless creatures that crowd the pages of literature of the late nineteenth century. Whether in Gothic novels, science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, journalism, political discourse, realism or naturalism, the line between the human and the animal becomes blurred. Beastly Journeys examines these bestial transformations across a range of well-known and less familiar texts and shows how they are provoked not only by the mutations of Darwinism but by social and economic shifts that have been lost in retellings and readings of them. The physical alterations described by George Gissing, George MacDonald, Arthur Machen, Arthur Morrison, W.T. Stead, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and many of their contemporaries, are responses to changes in the social body as Britain underwent a series of social and economic crises. Metaphors of travel social, spatial, temporal, mythical and psychological keep these stories on the move, confusing literary genres along with the indeterminacy of physical shape that they relate. Beastly Journeys will appeal to anyone interested in the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and its contexts and especially to those interested in the fin de si#65533;cle and in metaphors of travel, animals and shape-changing.
Tim Youngs is Professor of English and Travel Studies at Nottingham Trent University and the editor of the journal Studies in Travel Writing. He recently authored The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (2013).
