Abstract
This chapter introduces the concept of ‘human tissue’ as a way of approaching the realist novel in the nineteenth century. Engaging with theoretical discussions of the human from Amitav Ghosh, Sylvia Wynter, Georg Lukács, Michel Foucault and others, as well as discourses of material ecocriticism and the Anthropocene, this introductory chapter argues that the novels to be discussed in this book simultaneously construct or stabilise the figure of the human and break down or destabilise it. The chapter also engages with Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834) in order to argue that ‘human tissue’ is a particularly appropriate concept for reading literature from the Victorian period.
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Notes
- 1.
Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 8. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957).
- 2.
Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016), p. 14. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 48.
- 3.
Emily Steinlight, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2018), p. 15.
- 4.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 78–79.
- 5.
Ghosh, p. 35, p. 66.
- 6.
Ghosh, p. 30.
- 7.
Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3 (2003), 257–337 (p. 260).
- 8.
Wynter, p. 264.
- 9.
Wynter, p. 267, p. 266.
- 10.
Wynter, p. 281.
- 11.
Wynter, p. 310.
- 12.
Wynter, p. 280.
- 13.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), p. 135.
- 14.
History, p. 136.
- 15.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 489.
- 16.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 422.
- 17.
Foucault, p. 336.
- 18.
Foucault, p. 346.
- 19.
See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
- 20.
Peter Adkins, Wendy Parkins and Claire Colebrook, ‘Victorian Studies in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Claire Colebrook’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 26 (2018). https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.819.
- 21.
Jameson criticises ‘generations of critics intent on somehow separating Zola from the mainstream of nineteenth-century realism’. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), p. 45.
- 22.
‘realism, n’, 4.a, OED Online (Oxford University Press). www.oed.com/view/Entry/158931. Accessed 20 September 2021.
- 23.
George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (London: William Heinemann, 1928 [1886]), p. 76.
- 24.
Virginia Woold, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown (London: Hogarth, 1924), pp. 11–12.
- 25.
Foucault, p. 422.
- 26.
Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, p. 12.
- 27.
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. by T.M Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 13.
- 28.
Diana Postlethwaite, ‘George Eliot and Science’, in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. by George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 98–118 (p. 104).
- 29.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 134.
- 30.
Charles Baudelaire quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. by Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2006), p. 102.
- 31.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 227. See also Freud’s archaeological metaphors, including analysis as like ‘excavating a buried city’ (Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, The Standard Edition, Volume II, trans. by James Strachey and others (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 139) and a similar passage in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, in The Standard Edition, Volume III (1893–1899), trans. by James Strachey and others (London: Vintage, 1975), pp. 189–221 (p.192), as well as the passage on Rome as ‘a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past’ in Civilization and its Discontents, in Civilization, Society and Religion, The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 12, ed. by James Strachey and Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 243–340 (pp. 257–58).
- 32.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 4.
- 33.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 10. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Colombia University Press, 2016).
- 34.
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds, Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 1–2.
- 35.
Bennett, p. 3.
- 36.
Bennett, p. 2, p. 8.
- 37.
Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 2.
- 38.
Alaimo, p. 5.
- 39.
‘tissue, n’, OED Online (Oxford University Press). www.oed.com/view/Entry/202513. Accessed 21 September 2021.
- 40.
Robert Allen, ‘Technology’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain: Volume 1, 1700–1870, ed. by Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries and Paul Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 292–320 (p. 310).
- 41.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 3, p. 4. Carlyle is referring to the English surgeon and anatomist Sir William Lawrence (1783–1867), the French physiologist and vivisectionist François Magendie (1783–1855), and the French anatomist and pathologist Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), whose work on elementary tissue is an inspiration for Lydgate in Middlemarch.
- 42.
Carlyle, p. 4.
- 43.
Carlyle, p. 139, p. 149.
- 44.
Carlyle, p. 41.
- 45.
Carlyle, p. 57.
- 46.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. by Sander Gilman, Carole Blair and David Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 246–57 (p. 249).
- 47.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 11.
- 48.
Brian Massumi, ‘Translator’s Foreword’, in Deleuze and Guattari, pp. ix–xvi (p. xiv).
- 49.
Deleuze and Guattari, p. 5, p. 149, p. 158.
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Moore, B. (2023). Introduction: Human Tissue. In: Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895 . Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_1
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