John Ruskin's famous castigation in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880--81) of contemporary novels, particularly those of Charles Dickens and the sensation school, is frequently cast in the language of botany. Written at a time when Ruskin was immersed in Proserpina, his own botanical publication, this language points to Ruskin's discomfort with hybridity, whether manifested in sensation fiction---a hybrid genre combining domestic realism with the gothic romance---or accounted for in the botanical studies of Charles Darwin, both of which were, in Ruskin's eyes, unhealthily consumed with sex and violence.
...MoreBook Knoepflmacher, U. C.; Browning, Logan Delano (2010) Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation.
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