Unholy images of corruption : the beast-man in the nineteenth-century novel

Abstract

This is not a thesis about beasts. Nor is it a thesis about men. It is, rather, a thesis about that indefinable and inhospitable distance that exists between the two, represented in popular fiction by the image of the beast-man. Indicative of multivalent concerns about the autonomy of the human body, the figure of the beast-man is a profound and relatively unexplored topic in the popular fiction of the nineteenth-century. This thesis works to investigate the numerous and shifting representations of the beast-man, arguing that these were indicative of a profound anxiety about the human form specifically relating to scientific and social developments throughout the century. A largely reactive phenomenon, then, the beast-man was demonstrative of particular stresses in the social order.