Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture
Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination

The book reveals how Victorians biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations.

Will Abberley (Author)

9781108725767, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 June 2023

309 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.451 kg

'Mimicry and Display fits nicely within the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series, which has done so much to expand the range of high-quality scholarship on topics related to science and nature, technology, environment, and medicine. The chapters on Allen, Hardy, and late-century cultural criticism are especially good, and the book displays how widely and deeply scientific accounts of mimicry and camouflage in the natural world reverberated through Victorian literary culture.' Jonathan Smith, Victorian Studies

Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.

Introduction. Adaptive appearance in nineteenth-century culture
1. Seeing things: art, nature and science in representations of crypsis
2. Divine displays: Charles Kingsley, hermeneutic natural theology and the problem of adaptive appearance
3. Criminal chameleons: the evolution of deceit in Grant Allen's fiction
4. Darwin's little ironies: evolution and the ethics of appearance in Thomas Hardy's fiction
5. Blending in and standing out I: crypsis versus individualism in fin-de-siècle cultural criticism
6. 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.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900 [ACV], History of art / art & design styles [AC], Theory of art [ABA], The arts: general issues [AB], The arts [A]