Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-siècle

Front Cover
Manchester University Press, 2004 M09 4 - 191 pages
Victorian Demons provides the first extensive exploration of largely middle-class masculinities in crisis at the fin de siècle. It analyzes how ostensibly controlling models of masculinity became demonized in a variety of literary and medical contexts, revealing the period to be much more ideologically complex than has hitherto been understood. Andrew Smith demonstrates how a Gothic language of monstrosity, drawn from narratives such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula, increasingly influenced a range of medical and cultural contexts, destabilizing these apparently dominant masculine scripts. He provides a concise analysis of a range of examples relating to masculinity drawn from literary, medical, legal and sociological contexts, including Joseph Merrick (The Elephant Man), the Whitechapel murders of 1888, Sherlock Holmes's London, the writings and trials of Oscar Wilde, theories of degeneration and medical textbooks on syphilis.
 

Contents

Degeneration masculinity nationhood and the Gothic
14
the Elephant Man the Hysteric
45
journalism Gothic London and
67
the politics of disease
95
Sherlock Holmes Count Dracula
118
Wildes
150
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2004)

Andrew Smith is Professor of English Studies at the University of Glamorgan where he is Co-Director of the Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science (RCLAS)

Bibliographic information