Testing reality's limits

Abstract

In the late Victorian period, approaching the fin de siècle, popular fiction frequently featured what critics would now call mad scientists. These mad scientist characters served as a vehicle for Victorian authors to explore the epistemological relationship between humans and the material world, often highlighting the shortcomings of the human eye or subjective perception of reality. By tracing the scientific and supernatural discourses surrounding representations of scientists featured in works by H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, this revisionist literary history demonstrates that Victorian popular fiction and "classic realist" novels share a common interest in human perceptions and representations of a material reality. Arguing that the genre categories traditionally applied to these texts are permeable and unstable, Testing Reality's Limits continues work begun by scholars, such as George Levine, who redefined Victorian realism as a self-conscious experiment rather than a naively mimetic practice, and addresses literature not yet studied by such scholars.