Beastly Journeys

Tim Youngs is one of the founding fathers of Travel Writing as an academic discipline: establishing the field's leading journal, a book series with Routledge and as the author of some seminal interventions. Compulsory reading for travel writing scholars but also and especially for those working on the late nineteenth century, the gothic and in animal studies. Authors featured include Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Charles Darwin and George Gissing.

A critical exploration of travel, animals and shape-changing in fin de siècle literature.An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.

Bats, beetles, wolves, butterflies, bulls, panthers, apes, leopards and spiders are among the countless creatures that crowd the pages of literature of the late nineteenth century. Whether in Gothic novels, science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, journalism, political discourse, realism or naturalism, the line between the human and the animal becomes blurred. Beastly Journeys examines these bestial transformations across a range of well-known and less familiar texts and shows how they are provoked not only by the mutations of Darwinism but by social and economic shifts that have been lost in retellings and readings of them. The physical alterations described by George Gissing, George MacDonald, Arthur Machen, Arthur Morrison, W.T. Stead, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and many of their contemporaries, are responses to changes in the social body as Britain underwent a series of social and economic crises. Metaphors of travel – social, spatial, temporal, mythical and psychological – keep these stories on the move, confusing literary genres along with the indeterminacy of physical shape that they relate. Beastly Journeys will appeal to anyone interested in the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and its contexts and especially to those interested in the fin de siècle and in metaphors of travel, animals and shape-changing.