“This Seemingly So Solid Body”: Philosophical Anatomy and Victorian Fiction Public Deposited

Analytics

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Last Modified
  • March 21, 2019
Creator
  • Yan, Rae
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and Comparative Literature
Abstract
  • We often presume that “anatomy” is, simply, the scientific practice of deconstructing and dissecting the body. “‘This Seemingly So Solid Body’: Philosophical Anatomy and Victorian Fiction,” returns us to a period in the nineteenth-century when stable ideas of what it meant to anatomize and who could be an anatomist were undergoing serious challenge by a group of investigators interested in a now forgotten epistemology: philosophical anatomy. In the most straightforward sense of the term, philosophical anatomy describes the attempt to find universal forms and ideal structures common to all organisms through the practices of comparative anatomy. Philosophical anatomists saw the work of anatomy as one not specific to scientific communities, but common across many disciplines. I argue that philosophical anatomy reconstitutes anatomizing as more than a reductive, materialist science. Anatomizing, in this context, exceeds the simple dissection and reduction of human and animal bodies and becomes, instead, a creative reimagining of how such bodies relate to each other and even to non-human forces and energies. Studying the ways in which Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and George Eliot engage philosophical anatomy in their literary works, I reveal how philosophical anatomy profoundly shapes our present representational and interpretive practices.
Date of publication
Keyword
DOI
Resource type
Advisor
  • Langbauer, Laurie
  • Stern, Kimberly
  • Taylor, Beverly
  • McGowan, John
  • Moskal, Jeanne
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Graduation year
  • 2018
Language
Parents:

This work has no parents.

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
Default Yan_unc_0153D_17778.pdf 2019-04-08 Public
Default PREMIS_Events_Metadata_0_12f3298e-d9bf-4f52-baa0-a397e209713c.txt 2019-04-08 Public
Default original_metadata_file_12f3298e-d9bf-4f52-baa0-a397e209713c.xml 2019-04-08 Public