Christine Ferguson
Ashgate
Hardback
192
2006
Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction biology and philology at the Victorian fin-de-si?cle. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction and shows how popular novelists used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language thought and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste.
Ashgate
Hardback
192
2006
Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction biology and philology at the Victorian fin-de-si?cle. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction and shows how popular novelists used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language thought and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste.