Crossing the rubicon: Language and popular fiction at the fin-de-siecle
Description
'Crossing the Rubicon: Language and Popular Fiction at the Fin-de-Siecle' examines how Victorian scientific and cultural concerns about the status of the English language, and indeed, of language in general, affected the literary genre which seemed most representative of its decline, the popular novel. The dissertation aligns the fears of linguistic degeneration produced by the appearance of a newly-literate proletariat with those raised by the widely debated potential of animals to mimic, learn and develop basic language skills. The project argues that the popular novel, as apparent epitome of 'brutal' taste and mass language, refutes rather than confirms these fears of linguistic decline through its representation and ultimate reformulation of the relationship between language and human sovereignty. This point is demonstrated through an examination of three popular late-century texts which thematize and engage with problems of linguistic identity, status and meaning: Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895), H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). These texts' engagement with the formal, philosophical and national aspects of language undermines the high-modernist dismissal of popular fiction on the grounds of linguistic simplicity and transparency