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Reimagining dinosaurs in late Victorian and Edwardian literature
how the 'terrible lizard' became a transatlantic cultural icon
When 'dinosaur' was coined in 1842, it referred to a series of poorly known British fossils conceived as bulky lizards. Subsequent American discoveries like Brontosaurus, unearthed later in the century, proved that dinosaurs were far stranger than British experts had imagined. By the early twentieth century, in an age of opulent museums, 'dinosaur' was a household word. Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature approaches a vital but hitherto largely unexplored aspect of this rise to fame, the fiction and popular science writing that made this scientific term a meaningful one to huge transatlantic readerships. Unlike previous scholars, who have focused on the fossil displays in American museums, Fallon argues that literature, and especially British literature, was a key site for turning these extinct animals into cultural icons. Popular authors made dinosaurs relevant by relating them to wider concerns of the period, including empire, evolutionary progress and romance. Controversial writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Neville Hutchinson and J.J. Astor IV also used dinosaurs to disparage elitist scientific practices and undermine distinctions between 'scientific writing,' 'popular science' and 'literature.' As a result, the rise of the dinosaurs generated heated transatlantic discussions about the textual form of scientific authority.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 132