H. G. Wells and the Fin-de-Siècle Gustatory Paradox

Abstract Beginning with a little-studied scene linking H. G. Wells’s ‘A Misunderstood Artist’ to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours, this essay argues that a shared gustatory paradox runs from Huysmanian decadence, through the theories of Edwin Lankester and Max Nordau and into Wells’s writings. In each case, both a pragmatic and an aesthetic relationship to food can signify degeneration. The argument has three major stakes. The first is to reconstruct a robust intertextual relation between the oeuvres of Huysmans and Wells. The second is to complicate readings that cast two of Wells’s scientific romances, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, as mouthpieces for imperialist or (pseudo)scientific discourses (Anger, Brantlinger, Budd, Gailor, Gregory, Hendershot, Pick). The third is to build on recent studies of food representation in nineteenth-century literature and propose a novel interpretive method (Cozzi, Gyman, Lee). Taking up William Greenslade’s proposal that fictions construct a ‘network of resistances’ to discursive myths, I argue that gustatory scenes show Wells’s ‘network’ operating in a curious way. They neither kowtow to degeneration nor assume Greenslade’s active role of a ‘critical, combative humanist’. Instead, they give contradictory depictions of moralized eating that play out the myth’s structural paradox.

Download Full-text

The Role of Colorism in Nineteenth-Century Literature

THe Black Body of Literature. Colorism in American Fiction ◽

10.30965/9783657766789_004 ◽

2008 ◽

pp. 39-102

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Century Literature

Download Full-text

Kelly Hurley, The Gothic body: sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the fin de siècle, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 8, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. xii, 203, £30, $49.95 (0-521-55259-1).

Medical History ◽

10.1017/s0025727300063523 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 125-126

Author(s):

David Trotter

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Fin De Siecle ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Cambridge University ◽

Fin De Siècle ◽

Century Literature

Download Full-text

THACKERAY, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, AND THE DEMISE OF JOS SEDLEY

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150305000707 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 1-20

Author(s):

Deborah A. Thomas

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Capital Punishment ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

The Public ◽

Vanity Fair ◽

Public Execution ◽

The Subject ◽

Public Executions ◽

Century Literature

VANITY FAIRIS A NOVEL OF ENIGMAS. In particular, after finishing the book, readers have often wondered why Thackeray refuses to tell us clearly whether or not Becky actually kills Joseph Sedley in chapter 67–a question recently given prominence by John Sutherland as one of the “Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature” (66–72). The explanation most commonly given for Thackeray's evasiveness on this point is that such unanswered questions inVanity Fairare part of the artistry of this unconventional work of fiction, a book that A. E. Dyson has described as “surely one of the world's most devious novels” (76). This view ofVanity Fairas a novel of narrative legerdemain–intended to keep the reader constantly alert and pondering what is being shown (or concealed)–is certainly true. However, an additional possible explanation for Thackeray's ambiguity on the subject of Jos's death also ought to be considered. This explanation lies in Thackeray's horrified reaction to the public execution of François Benjamin Courvoisier on 6 July 1840. The echoes between Thackeray's appalled description of the events of that morning and his subsequent famous novel suggest that he privately conceived of Becky as murdering Jos. The echoes also suggest that one reason why Thackeray handled this fictional murder obliquely is that, by the time of writingVanity Fair, he had come to believe that, although executions might occur, they should not take place in public. Exploring the subtle connections between Thackeray's profound revulsion at the death of Courvoisier and Thackeray's later treatment of Jos's death gives deeper meaning to the intentional ambiguities in chapter 67. These connections make the ambiguities surrounding the death of Jos part of a widespread debate over capital punishment in the 1840s and have significant ramifications in terms of the parallel between public executions and pornography and with regard to the role of Becky in this novel.

Download Full-text

Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s

10.1017/9781316855546 ◽

2019 ◽

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Century Literature

Download Full-text

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Dickens and the Daughter of the House ◽

10.1017/cbo9780511484919.010 ◽

2000 ◽

pp. 233-234

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Century Literature

Download Full-text

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

Cultural History ◽

10.3366/cult.2015.0090 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 113-135

Author(s):

Lucila Mallart

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Built Environment ◽

Identity Politics ◽

Nation Building ◽

Constitutive Relationship ◽

Fin De Siecle ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Fin De Siècle ◽

Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Download Full-text