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RACIAL AND CRIMINAL TYPES: INDIAN ETHNOGRAPHY AND SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE'S THE SIGN OF FOUR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2005

John McBratney
John McBratney
Affiliation:
John Carroll University
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Extract

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, scientific taxonomies shaped fictional narratives in highly ambiguous ways. On the one hand, novels–to take the predominant literary genre of the time–invoked the language of science to lend their structures the authority of those models of rationality that seemed to provide the most credible explanations of the observable world. Quite naturally, the project of realism, in its search for verisimilitude, drew upon those explanatory schemas that seemed to offer the closest simulacra of the real. Yet the novels of the period also resisted the authority of the scientific discourses they incorporated. If scientific taxonomies tend toward aggregation–in other words, the fitting of newly discovered forms within classificatory systems of previously known structures–novels, it can be argued, tend toward disaggregation, the resistance of individual characters to those social categories that seek to contain them.

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN TAXONOMIES
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 149 - 167
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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