Re-imagining the 'Dark Continent' in fin de siécle Literature (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)
Robbie McLaughlan
Explores the fin de siècle mission to open up the `Dark Continent’
This study maps the effects of a cartographic blankness in literature and its impact upon early Modernist culture, through the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis and the debt that Freud owed to African exploration. It demonstrates that tales of intrepid exploration and of dramatic cultural encounters between indigenous populations - often serialised in missionary magazines - had a profound influence on every facet of late Victorian and early Modernist culture. As Robbie McLaughlan shows, this influence manifested itself most clearly in the late Victorian `best-seller’ which blended this arcane ... Read more
Key Features:
* Opens up the 'dark continent' and its literary, historical and theoretical manifestations
* Argues for an anticipation of a modernist aesthetic suggesting an unexplored relation between fin de siècle sensation literature, in particular mesmeric fiction, and psychoanalysis
* Diverges from established colonial histories by drawing on an archive of special and neglected material Keywords: postcolonial, psychoanalysis, fin de siècle, mesmerism, colonial, missionary, cartography
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