Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Miller, John

Titel

Creatures on the “Night-Side of Nature”: James Thomson’s Melancholy Ethics

Ist Teil von

• Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, p.189-211

Ort / Verlag

London: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Victorian poet and essayist James Thomson was remarkable, above all, for the darkness of his vision; his work, in the words of the novelist George Meredith, was “plucked out of the most tragic life in our literature.” It is precisely because of his distinctive, nihilistic cast of mind that Thomson’s writing comprises a significant contribution to Victorian ideas about animals. Although inevitably it is impossible to disentangle the intellectual from the pathological in Thomson’s melancholia, his fascination with the “night-side of nature” was more than a tragic personal circumstance, but part of a complex, idiosyncratic and evolving philosophy that overlaps in important ways with animal studies as it has developed over the last two decades.