The Gothic Body
Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle

The popularity of the Gothic in the British fin de siècle, and its links with scientific and social theories.

Kelly Hurley (Author)

9780521552592, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 December 1996

220 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 2.1 cm, 0.442 kg

Readers familiar with Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde may not know that dozens of equally remarkable Gothic texts were written in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth-century. This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siècle. Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative 'abhuman' identity in its place. She shows that such representations of Gothic bodies are strongly indebted to those found in nineteenth-century biology and social medicine, evolutionism, criminal anthropology, and degeneration theory. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, standing in opportunistic relation to nineteenth-century scientific and social theories.

Introduction
Part I. The Gothic Material World: 1. The revenge of matter
2. Symptomatic readings
Part II. Gothic Bodies: 3. Evolutionism and the loss of human specificity
4. Entropic bodies
5. Chaotic bodies
Part III. Gothic Sexualities: 6. Uncanny female interiors
7. Abjected masculinities
Afterword
8. Narrative chaos.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]