Vivisections, Vaccinations, Revelations: Ecofeminist Satire and Biopolitical Dystopia in Frances Power Cobbe’s The Age of Science
- Autor(en)
- P. Fagan
- Abstrakt
This chapter undertakes an animal studies, ecofeminist, and biopolitical reading of Frances Power Cobbe’s science-fiction satire 'The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century' (1877). Cobbe’s depiction of the vivisected, tortured, and exterminated animal body is foregrounded as a point of access to the work’s diverse satirical targets. Firstly, The Age of Science is situated in a network of satirical and speculative traditions, from Victorian feminist science fiction and the Swiftian grotesque to biopolitical dystopian literature. Secondly, Cobbe’s future dystopia is read as a satire of the patriarchal values of Victorian medical discourse and practice, which discloses the ideological affinities between pro-vivisection and anti-feminist movements. Thirdly, attention is drawn to mandatory vaccinations as a previously neglected target of the novella’s anti-medical satire and this convergence of animal rights activism, feminism, and vaccine scepticism is explained by historicising it in relation to the Victorian physical purity movement. In closing, it is shown how Cobbe heightens the stakes of this conflict between scientific utilitarianism and human/nonhuman life in the newspaper’s final apocalyptic prophecy of anthropogenic mass extinction.
- Organisation(en)
- Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
- Seiten
- 209-226
- Anzahl der Seiten
- 18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_13
- Publikationsdatum
- 2023
- Peer-reviewed
- Ja
- ÖFOS 2012
- 602008 Anglistik
- Schlagwörter
- ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Social Sciences (miscellaneous), Literature and Literary Theory
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 3 – Gesundheit und Wohlergehen
- Link zum Portal
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/4bc543f8-2df3-4872-8e28-83f83887c018