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.
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