Projects per year
Abstract
The founders of cryptozoology in the 1950s implied that their objects of investigation, animals elsewhere presumed mythical or extinct, were beyond respectable science. In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson had been by no means idiosyncratic in believing that American fossils represented living animals. The subsequent near-consensus regarding extinction was, moreover, complicated in the mid-nineteenth century by evidence that early humans lived alongside mammoths, and by views that myths about monsters were based on human encounters with prehistoric creatures. Such creatures were soon incorporated into a genre of short horror stories. The origin of this familiar genre has rarely been considered in detail. Firstly, I explain, in a transatlantic context, why the ‘living fossil short story’ emerged when it did. Next, I argue that these stories displayed simultaneous urges, firstly, to disturb the natural order by putting the monstrous inhabitants of deep time in contact with contemporary humans, and secondly, to interrogate the directionality of nature by asking whether manly, modern St Georges can return these animals to extinction. I focus on two key examples written by American authors: Charles Jacobs Peterson’s “The Last Dragon” (1871) and Wardon Allan Curtis’s “The Monster of Lake LaMetrie” (1899).
Original language | English |
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Journal | Comparative American Studies |
Early online date | 17 Aug 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 17 Aug 2023 |
Keywords
- Crypto-fiction
- prehistoric animals
- Peterson’s Magazine
- Pearson’s Magazine
- Charles Jacobs Peterson
- Wardon Allan Curtis
- cryptozoology
- degeneration
- masculinity
- extinction
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Dive into the research topics of 'Discovering the Living Fossil Short Story in the Late Nineteenth Century'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Borderline Geoscience and Transatlantic Literature in the Age of Lost Worlds
1/09/20 → 14/09/23
Project: Research