Love and Vivisection: Wilkie Collins's Experiment in Heart and Science

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Straley
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Human Emotion ◽  
Medical Experiments ◽  
Literary Practices

Jessica Straley, "Love and Vivisection: Wilkie Collins's Experiment in Heart and Science"(pp. 348––373) This essay examines the paradox of Wilkie Collins's antivivisection sensation novel, Heart and Science (1883). in the plot of the cruel vivisector Dr. Benjulia and the helpless young woman who almost becomes his latest experiment, the novel draws from a familiar bounty of antivivisectionist propaganda, but, this essay argues, the novel also reveals Collins's thinking about his own literary genre and the unfavorable comparison many critics were making between vivisection and sensation fiction: medical experiments on live animals often electrified their subjects, and sensation novels likewise shocked their readers. More than simply a metaphor, this connection between scientific and literary practices pointed to a late-Victorian anxiety about physiological sensation and moral reasoning. The focus on the body, critics of both practices maintained, bypassed the authority of the soul and turned human agents into passive receptors incapable of the higher functions of rationality and ethics. In its preface, Heart and Science disavows any relation between its narration and the medical dissection it deplores, and much of the novel progresses without the sensation genre's characteristic shocks. But Collins's text also seeks to recover and to redeem physiology as the basis for human emotion and ethics and, in so doing, to redefine sensation fiction as an aid, rather than an inhibitor, to moral agency.

scholarly journals Plotting Sensation Stories: Affect and Intuition in Short Sensation Fiction

2000 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Brittany Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Mistaken Identity ◽  
Difficult Time

The British short story is still an understudied form in Victorian studies, and particularly so in studies of sensation fiction. Despite rich and growing scholarship on sensation fiction and its relationship with literary markets and commodity culture, scholars have a had a difficult time shaking off its enduring brand “the novel with a secret,” which has problematically discounted an incredible body of periodical fiction that falls “short” of our expectations about what this kind of fiction looks like. Short periodical works, however, are crucial if we are to understand the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, things which have largely come to organise our understanding of what was so sensational about this historical moment in time. This essay compares short and long works from Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and J.S. Le Fanu to explore how short stories could take up common themes and features of sensation novels (mistaken identity, unchecked passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, etc.) while also considering how formal considerations of length encouraged greater reliance on impressions and feelings to resolve conflicts in the text. These sensation stories so often suggest that deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind, and they create a path to pleasurable revelation where trusting one’s gut offers the most effective form of policing. These supposedly “unimportant” periodical works – sensational not only in the way they glutted periodicals with their sheer volume – could in turn promote suspicion and distrust in readers that were capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships. Although short fiction could provoke anxieties about shifting roles and hierarchies in an increasingly fast-paced, automated British society, the tremendous visibility of the novel effectively shielded them from comparable criticism.

Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-108
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Corporeal Body ◽  
Physical Instability

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and focalization of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), this chapter argues that bodies in sensation fiction function both as spectacle, exhibitions of physical instability, and as specimens, case studies on the source of identity. In Aurora Floyd, focalization through an authoritative external perspective provides ‘correct’ interpretations of bodies which have previously been misinterpreted by physiognomy, phrenology, and lineage. In particular, the narrator uses external focalization on disabled villains to manifest how identity appears in bodies and to place eugenic value on those with healthy bodies. By contrast, The Moonstone, lacking authoritative external focalization due to its multiple first-person narrators, uses plot to reveal misinterpretations of disabled bodies, in particular that of Rosanna Spearman. In addition, internally focalized interactions between normate narrators and disabled characters in the novel often cause the narrators to recognize the instability of their own identities and bodies, and thus of normalcy. However, the novel’s overall narrative structure works to control deviance through linearity, which imposes normalcy as a stable, final result.

The Body under Siege

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-255
Author(s):  
Kimberly Canuette Grimaldi
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Body ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Apartment Building ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
War Zone ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Partial Body

Abstract Betool Khedairi’s novel Ghāyib (Absent) centers on a young woman living and working in Baghdad during the 1990s and her interactions with the inhabitants of her apartment building. The novel depicts the transformations of bodies that occur in the war zone: transformations from a whole body to a partial body, from healthy to ill, from interconnected to isolated, and from wholesome to poisoned. This article argues that the systemic disabling and poisoning of women’s bodies in the novel violates the sanctity of the home and body and mirrors the destruction and poisoning of private and public spaces in Baghdad. Transformations brought about by shelling and sanctions are at the heart of the nature of war as that which renders bodies isolated, static, and toxic.

“SKINS TO JUMP INTO”: THE SLIPPERINESS OF IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN WILKIE COLLINS'S NO NAME

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Banking System ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Social Deviance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Response ◽  
The One

Victorian sensation literature was inextricably related to identity and the body: its primary purposes were to elicit a physical response from the senses of readers and to question “the social formation of the self” (Taylor, The Secret 2). Sensation fiction regularly relied on different, deformed, or diseased bodies to provoke fear or unease in its readers, and it created anxiety by juxtaposing the domestic with scandal, crime, and Gothicism to disturb the perceived stability of the home and social identity. Lyn Pykett argues that the genre reproduces the “real mid-nineteenth-century anxiety” that domestic selfhood “could be disrupted by danger, death or disease on the one hand, and the vagaries of the law, the banking system or the stockmarket on the other” (“Collins” 59). Nineteenth-century critics’ reactions to sensation novels connected anxieties about the body to fears about the instability of social identity: contemporary reviews described sensation literature and its works as “feverish” (Smith 141), “a collective cultural nervous disorder” (Taylor, The Secret 4), and as “symptoms of . . . social disease” (Pykett, “Collins” 51). In his 1880–81 series of essays, “Fiction Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin argues that the “[p]hysically diseased, ‘deformed,’ and ignobly dead bodies [in Collins's and Dickens's novels] are symptomatic of diseased and deformed genres, produced by morally and physically ill writers to cater to the tastes of morally and physically diseased urban readers” (Holmes, Fictions 92). These extreme critical responses, as well as the extreme popularity of sensation fiction, call attention to Victorian preoccupation with the body and social identity and with the instability of both. This paper, through analyzing the instability of bodies and identities in Wilkie Collins's sensation novel No Name (1862) and its serial context, challenges readings by both Victorian and more recent critics that distinctly interpret diseased and disabled bodies in the novel as either symbolic of or a result of social deviance.

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Novel Nanolipoidal Systems for the Management of Skin Cancer

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-125
Author(s):  
Apoorva Singh ◽  
Nimisha
Keyword(s):  
Skin Cancer ◽  
Survival Rates ◽  
Cancer Therapeutics ◽  
The Body ◽  
Surgical Removal ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Skin Cancers ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Abnormal Cells ◽  
The Stability

: Skin cancer, among the various kinds of cancers, is a type that emerges from skin due to the growth of abnormal cells. These cells are capable of spreading and invading the other parts of the body. The occurrence of non-melanoma and melanoma, which are the major types of skin cancers, has increased over the past decades. Exposure to ultraviolet radiations (UV) is the main associative cause of skin cancer. UV exposure can inactivate tumor suppressor genes while activating various oncogenes. The conventional techniques like surgical removal, chemotherapy and radiation therapy lack the potential for targeting cancer cells and harm the normal cells. However, the novel therapeutics show promising improvements in the effectiveness of treatment, survival rates and better quality of life for patients. Different methodologies are involved in the skin cancer therapeutics for delivering the active ingredients to the target sites. Nano carriers are very efficient as they have the ability to improve the stability of drugs and further enhance their penetration into the tumor cells. The recent developments and research in nanotechnology have entitled several targeting and therapeutic agents to be incorporated into nanoparticles for an enhancive treatment of skin cancer. To protect the research works in the field of nanolipoidal systems various patents have been introduced. Some of the patents acknowledge responsive liposomes for specific targeting, nanocarriers for the delivery or co-delivery of chemotherapeutics, nucleic acids as well as photosensitizers. Further recent patents on the novel delivery systems have also been included here.

The Castle of Otranto

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horace Walpole
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Game Changer ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Grotesque

‘Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions’ The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the darkest Middle Ages, the novel tells of Manfred, prince of Otranto, whose fear of an ancient prophecy sets him on a course of destruction. After the grotesque death of his only son, Conrad, on his wedding day, Manfred determines to marry the bride–to–be. The virgin Isabella flees through a castle riddled with secret passages. Chilling coincidences, ghostly visitations, arcane revelations, and violent combat combine in a heady mix that terrified the novel's first readers. In this new edition Nick Groom examines the reasons for its extraordinary impact and the Gothic culture from which it sprang. The Castle of Otranto was a game-changer, and Walpole the writer who paved the way for modern horror exponents.

On Antigone’s Suffering

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-231
Author(s):  
Ankhi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Personal Loss ◽  
The Relationship

Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.

scholarly journals Disease Mechanisms and Therapeutic Approaches in C9orf72 ALS-FTD

Biomedicines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 601
Author(s):  
Keith Mayl ◽  
Christopher E. Shaw ◽  
Youn-Bok Lee
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Therapeutic Approaches ◽  
Gain Of Function ◽  
Pathogenic Mechanisms ◽  
Hexanucleotide Repeat ◽  
Primary Driver ◽  
Hexanucleotide Repeat Expansion ◽  
Expansion Mutation ◽  
Lateral Sclerosis

A hexanucleotide repeat expansion mutation in the first intron of C9orf72 is the most common known genetic cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia. Since the discovery in 2011, numerous pathogenic mechanisms, including both loss and gain of function, have been proposed. The body of work overall suggests that toxic gain of function arising from bidirectionally transcribed repeat RNA is likely to be the primary driver of disease. In this review, we outline the key pathogenic mechanisms that have been proposed to date and discuss some of the novel therapeutic approaches currently in development.

scholarly journals The Embodiment of Insult: A Theory of Biobehavioral Response to Workplace Incivility

2021 ◽  
pp. 014920632198979
Author(s):  
Lilia M. Cortina ◽  
M. Sandy Hershcovis ◽  
Kathryn B. H. Clancy
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Responses ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Workplace Incivility ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Connections ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Target Response ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
New Science ◽  
Broad Theory

This article builds a broad theory to explain how people respond, both biologically and behaviorally, when targeted with incivility in organizations. Central to our theorizing is a multifaceted framework that yields four quadrants of target response: reciprocation, retreat, relationship repair, and recruitment of support. We advance the novel argument that these behaviors not only stem from biological change within the body but also stimulate such change. Behavioral responses that revolve around affiliation and produce positive social connections are most likely to bring biological benefits. However, social and cultural features of an organization can stand in the way of affiliation, especially for employees holding marginalized identities. When incivility persists over time and employees lack access to the resources needed to recover, we theorize, downstream consequences can include harms to their physical health. Like other aspects of organizational life, this biobehavioral theory of incivility response is anything but simple. But it may help explain how seemingly “small” insults can sometimes have large effects, ultimately undermining workforce well-being. It may also suggest novel sites for incivility intervention, focusing on the relational and inclusive side of work. The overarching goal of this article is to motivate new science on workplace incivility, new knowledge, and ultimately, new solutions.

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