Atomistic Being. Solid, Fluid, Gaseous: Late 19th Century Literary Imaginations of (Non-)Human Matter
The late 19th century saw an impressive surge of scientific research into the nature of matter and its atomic structures, which generated a broader public and artistic interest in the material building blocks of life. Literary discourse is one of the realms reflecting this phenomenon. In the context of the US and its cultural self-understanding at a moment of post-war (re-)integration, faced with the pressing question of how to reconcile “the one and the many,” make “one out of many,” the idea of atomistic life struck a chord.
This dissertation project pursues the question of how flourishing research into states and structures of matter resonated in American fiction of the age. It claims that the late 19th century strong scientific interest in and growing understanding of the atom and its composites affected human notions of self and world in a seemingly paradoxical way conflating a sense of anxiety and fascination, separation and relationality undergirded by a specific atomistic aesthetics. While there is a considerable body of scholarship about the literary renderings of the atom in Renaissance writing, Romantic, or Modernist literature, strangely, the fiction of the final decades of the 19th century when atomist research was at a peak, has not received as much attention yet.
Drawing on new materialist, posthumanist, and ecocritical theory, this dissertation project will intervene at precisely this point. It intends to shed light on how fiction of that time took up scientific discourse and debates to coin a specific image of humans and their environment that has had repercussions up to the present day.