Immoral Science in The Picture of Dorian Gray (2017)
Moving from the body’s relationship with the external world to its internal biological functions, Suzanne Raitt contextualizes Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray within the scientific discourse on the operations of cell metabolism and division that repairs the waste of the body’s natural processes. By foregrounding the novel’s considerable engagement with science, Raitt shows how the novel operates as a dark fantasy about the possibility of art substituting for the natural limits of biological processes, and, like those processes, inevitably failing. The picture, then, is not only an aesthetic image of moral repression, but even more universally the literalization of the inexorable biological progress toward death. (From Introduction, page 10)
...MoreBook Lara Pauline Karpenko; Shalyn Rae Claggett (2016) Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age.
Similar Citations
Book
Benjamin Morgan;
(2017)
The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB589999395/)
Article
Janes, Dominic;
(2014)
Oscar Wilde, Sodomy, and Mental Illness in Late Victorian England
(/isis/citation/CBB001550469/)
Chapter
Levine, George;
(2013)
Darwin and the Art of Paradox
(/isis/citation/CBB001422078/)
Thesis
Farooq, Nihad M.;
(2006)
Sensing Subjects: Ethnographic Modernity from Charles Darwin to Richard Wright
(/isis/citation/CBB001561530/)
Article
Caroline Sumpter;
(2016)
'No Artist Has Ethical Sympathies': Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution
(/isis/citation/CBB408800938/)
Article
Hanley, James;
(2002)
Edwin Chadwick and the Poverty of Statistics
(/isis/citation/CBB000200379/)
Article
Harris, Bernard;
Gorsky, Martin;
Guntupalli, Aravinda;
Hinde, Andrew;
(2011)
Ageing, Sickness and Health in England and Wales during the Mortality Transition
(/isis/citation/CBB001210679/)
Thesis
Davies, Linda Margaret;
(2007)
The Conquest of Infant Mortality: The Case of Hemsworth, 1871--1911
(/isis/citation/CBB001561517/)
Article
Razzell, Peter;
Spence, Christine;
(2006)
The Hazards of Wealth: Adult Mortality in Pre-Twentieth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB000770626/)
Book
Melanie Reynolds;
(2016)
Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899
(/isis/citation/CBB958307648/)
Article
Brauckmann, Sabine;
(2011)
Axes, Planes and Tubes, or the Geometry of Embryogenesis
(/isis/citation/CBB001221526/)
Article
Bruhn, Matthias;
(2011)
Life Lines: An Art History of Biological Research around 1800
(/isis/citation/CBB001221525/)
Chapter
Otis, Laura;
(2005)
Cells and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB000772462/)
Book
Anna K. Sagal;
(2021)
Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB259998433/)
Book
Michael Boulter;
(2018)
Bloomsbury Scientists: Science and Art in the Wake of Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB021619597/)
Article
Blumenthal, Stanley A.;
(2012)
Earl Sutherland (1915--1975) and the Discovery of Cyclic Amp
(/isis/citation/CBB001201291/)
Article
Thomas Sharpe;
(2022)
Henri De la Beche's 1829-1830 litograph, duria antiquior
(/isis/citation/CBB971607561/)
Book
John Holmes;
(2021)
Temple of Science: The Pre-Raphaelites and Oxford University Museum of Natural History
(/isis/citation/CBB177160072/)
Article
Allister Neher;
(2015)
William Clift's Sketches of Executed Murderers
(/isis/citation/CBB245301996/)
Article
Anthony French;
(2022)
The colouring of John Curtis’s British entomology (1834–1839): Joseph Standish and “the paragon of perfection”
(/isis/citation/CBB473136138/)
Be the first to comment!