Typifying the Human. Visual Anthropology and Its Late- and Neo-Victorian Critiques

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The project investigates late Victorian and neo-Victorian critiques of the scientific, sociological, and literary conceptions of human types as they were voiced in nineteenth century Britain. It starts from the assumption that late and neo-Victorian cultural productions share a set of representational techniques as well as a critical agenda which hinges on the moment of cultural emergence of scientific materialism. Consequently, it takes a close look at the anthropological side of literary typifications, at taxonomic models, the representation of regimes of the gaze and serial ways of presentation in literary, pictorial and cultural practices. The typifying gaze at the human face, its classification in the emerging disciplines of anthropology and ethnology, its instrumentalisation in fantasies of surveillance, as well as the eugenic measures developed in reaction to fears of what was perceived as racial degeneration are analysed as symptoms of a cultural dilemma at the heart of which is the problematic relation of hereditary determinism and social milieu. How do milieu and biology impact on the conception and perception of human types, and how do, vice versa, normative types interact with the agency and self-esteem of the subjects? The artistic representation of these inherent conflicts in late Victorian literature and in neo-Victorian comic emphasises the fault lines of scientific naturalism, the unreliability of human perception as well as the inevitable subjectivity of any representation of the human. Literary modes like the fantastic enact this crisis of visibility as a crisis of realist writing and could thus be considered proto-modernist; the aesthetics of neo-Victorian comic visualises the same crisis by recourse to techniques of fragmentation and alienation which can likewise be described as modernist techniques. Through exemplary analyses of late Victorian fantastic fiction and neo-Victorian comics the project will investigate the interactions and interdependencies between scientific and aesthetic approaches to typification and between literary and pictorial ways of figuration and character depiction. It will trace the inherent contradictions of a physiognomic semiotics and will analyse the selected texts potential as a means of autoethnographic cultural critique.