The fantastic natural and the evolutionary imagination in nineteenth-century France
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation argues that naturalism was not literature's only response to evolutionary theory. Instead, I propose that the fantastic natural, a subversive literary mode, challenged cohesive representations of evolutionary nature by paradoxically using scientific discourse to evoke supernatural figures across diverse literary genres. The fantastic natural thereby both naturalizes the supernatural and super-naturalizes the natural world. My research shows how the fantastic natural's blurring of traditional distinctions between human and animal, male and female, and organism and environment reveals anxieties about modern man's de-centered role in evolutionary history and identifies powerful implications for the evolutionary understanding of gender, sexuality, and race. Moreover, these concerns expose a new environmental and anthropocenic consciousness in both canonical and experimental texts that destabilizes traditional generic distinctions between naturalist, decadent, fantastic, and scientific fiction.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Deam, Natalie Sherwood |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Cohen, Margaret, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Wittman, Laura |
| Degree committee member | Cohen, Margaret, 1958- |
| Degree committee member | Wittman, Laura |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of French & Italian. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Natalie Deam. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of French & Italian. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Natalie Sherwood Deam
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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