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This thesis is an interdisciplinary study that traces colloquial engagements with extinction in Victorian print culture (1859-1901). Extinction’s broad cultural life demonstrates the extent that scientific and cultural topics intricately entangled within Victorian print networks. Non-specialist Britons absorbed and transmitted evolutionary (particularly, Darwinian) knowledges within public discursive spaces instead of exclusively institutional settings. Class stratification did not bar non-specialists from absorbing and perpetuating cultural conversations about collapses, conservationism, and overconsumption. My project thus seeks to amend the critical discourse that assumes that Victorians passively accepted impending catastrophes or paid scant attention to extinction pressures. I recover multiple subjects formerly hidden in the vast Victorian archives: obscure non-specialists of the working and middle classes, obscurer animals cohabiting the Victorian’s everyday spaces, and the popular (and in some cases, underappreciated) literary texts demonstrating how Victorians circulated extinction discourses. Chapters One and Two explore the non-literary side of print culture, recovering widely disseminated but now largely unknown periodical artifacts (the domain of Punch, The Times, or Funny Folks). Chapter One focuses on cultural reactions to collapses of England’s domestic birds. Chapter Two traces the economized conservationism of the Brooke Brothers, popular game and meat traders. In both chapters, I determine how experienced evolutionary knowledges revealed the human-caused tenuousness of a trans-species milieu. Chapters Three and Four concentrate on scientific romances originally serialized in periodicals, including my key literary case studies, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). Musing on extinction led to a mindset that acknowledged entanglement with nonhuman others as an ethical imperative. However, some case studies demonstrate a profound ambivalence toward the human’s self-extinction, resulting in a complicated engagement with future forms that often re-privileges the human from within a radical ontology. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This study examines how Victorians absorbed and communicated ideas about extinction, especially as informed by evolutionary theory. Throughout Victorian newspapers, journals, and literature, extinction was adopted for disparate uses. A culturally, economically, and philosophically muddied topic, extinction provoked reconsiderations of the natural world and humankind’s place within it. I begin by examining advertisements, articles, and illustrations from popular newsprint and periodical sources that communicated fears about the extinction of common animals and concerns about controlling or maintaining bird and game populations in everyday Victorian life. When I turn my attention to my literary case studies, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, I analyze the period’s preoccupation with the human’s future forms, looking at both posthuman evolutionary outcomes and the experience of becoming-nonhuman itself. Significantly, this project recovers underappreciated Victorians and texts, filling important gaps in Victorian periodical studies and animal studies.

This thesis aims to discuss how we should understand concepts such as humanism and posthumanism through readings of Kerstin Ekman’s Hunden (1986) and Löpa varg (2021). In particular it explores the concepts in relation to the core values such as ”respecting the environment” and ”western humanism” that features in the Swedish curriculum. I do so by using Rosi Briadotti’s theories on nomadic subjects and Malin Alkestrand’s didactic potential. Seeing Kerstin Ekman as a writer who problematize our understanding of humanism and posthumanism in relation to nature relies on the scholarly findings of primarily Linda Haverty Rugg, Marie Öhman and Anna-Karin Jonasson. In the first part of the analysis I argue for an understanding of the character Ulf in Löpa varg as a nomadic subject from whoms subjectivity a struggle between the humanism and the posthumanism arises, in relation to the attacks he encounters. The second part of the analysis focuses on Hunden and I ascertain an understanding of the novels conflict as a subjective becoming that the canine main protagonist Den gråe undergoes. Through this we see an argument of the nature’s flora and fauna as bearers of a soul in their own right. The third and final part of the analysis ties the found themes and motifs together and ponders how they could be used in the classroom. The focal take-away from the analysis is that a combination of humanistic and posthumanistic values reigns in the novels. Sometimes the nodes of knowing and unknowing needs to be blurred to navigate through life, if life’s objective is respecting both nature and the humans therein.

This dissertation examines the figures of the shaman and the cyborg, arguing that both act as intermediaries between the organic world of bodies and the artificial world of culture and machines. Using the sf of Robert Holdstock, David Zindell and Kathleen Ann Goonan as starting points, new forms of embodiment in the context of the cyborg and the shaman's shared narrative of radical boundary dissolution are critically and imaginatively examined. Throughout this thesis, the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Sadie Plant, Manuel De Landa, Erik Davis, Donna Haraway, Terence McKenna, and other speculative theorists who operate at the nexus of technological culture and the shamanic imagination serve as guidelines. / English Studies / M.A.

Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler argue that human perception relies on a form, or gestalt, into which perceptions are assimilated. Gestalt theory has been applied to the visual arts by Rudolf Arnheim and to literature by Wolfgang Iser. My original contribution to knowledge is to use gestalt theory to perform literary criticism, an approach that highlights the importance of perception in William Gibson's novels and the impact of this emphasis on posthumanism and science fiction studies. Science fiction addresses the problem of difference and the relationship between self and other. Gestalt literary criticism takes perception as the interface between the self and the other, the human and the inhuman. Gibson's work is of particular interest as his early novels are representative of 1980s cyberpunk while his later novels push the boundaries of science fiction through their contemporary settings. By engaging with Gibson the thesis makes its contribution to contemporary science fiction criticism explicit. In Gibson's Sprawl trilogy autopoiesis defines life and consciousness, elevating the importance of perception (Chapter I). The Bridge trilogy uses the metaphor of chaos theory to examine dialectic tensions, such as the tension between space and cyberspace (Chapter II). Faulty pattern recognition is a key theme in Gibson's post-9/11 work as gestalt perception allows and limits knowledge (Chapter III). Chapter IV explains how the gestalt in psychoanalysis creates a fragmented subject in Spook Country (2007). Finally, the gestalt appears as a parallax view, a view that oscillates between the world we experience and the world as represented in the text (Chapter V). I conclude that gestalt literary criticism offers an exciting new reading of Gibson's work that recognises its engagement with visual culture and cyberpunk as a whole.

The figure of the cyborg, or more latterly, the posthuman body has been an increasingly familiar presence in a number of academic disciplines. The majority of such studies have focused on popular culture, particularly the depiction of the posthuman in science-fiction, fantasy and horror. To date however, few studies have focused on the posthuman and the comic book superhero, despite their evident corporeality, and none have questioned comics’ readers about their responses to the posthuman body. This thesis presents a cultural history of the posthuman body in superhero comics along with the findings from twenty-five, two-hour interviews with readers. By way of literature reviews this thesis first provides a new typography of the posthuman, presenting it not as a stable bounded subject but as what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe as a ‘rhizome’. Within the rhizome of the posthuman body are several discursive plateaus that this thesis names Superhumanism (the representation of posthuman bodies in popular culture), Post/Humanism (a critical-theoretical stance that questions the assumptions of Humanism) and Transhumanism (the philosophy and practice of human enhancement with technology). With these categories in mind the thesis explores the development of the posthuman in body in the Superhuman realm of comic books. Exploring the body-types most prominent during the Golden (1938-1945), Silver (1958-1974) and contemporary Ages of superheroes it presents three explorations of what I term the Perfect Body, Cosmic Body and Military-Industrial Body respectively. These body types are presented as ‘assemblages’ (Delueze and Guattari, 1987) that display rhizomatic connections to the other discursive realms of the Post/Human and Transhuman. This investigation reveals how the depiction of the Superhuman body developed and diverged from, and sometimes back into, these realms as each attempted to territorialise the meaning and function of the posthuman body. Ultimately it describes how, in spite of attempts by nationalistic or economic interests to control Transhuman enhancement in real-world practices, the realms of Post/Humanism and Superhumanism share a more critical approach. The final section builds upon this cultural history of the posthuman body by addressing reader’s relationship with these images. This begins by refuting some of the common assumptions in comics studies about superheroes and bodily representations. Readers stated that they viewed such imagery as iconographic rather than representational, whether it was the depiction of bodies or technology. Moreover, regular or committed readers of superhero comics were generally suspicious of the notion of human enhancement, displaying a belief in the same binary categories -artificial/natural, human/non-human - that critical Post/Humanism seeks to problematize. The thesis concludes that while superhero comics remain ultimately too human to be truly Post/Humanist texts, it is never the less possible to conceptualise the relationship between reader, text, producer and so on in Post/Humanist terms as reading-assemblage, and that such a cyborgian fusing of human and comic book allow both bodies to ‘become other’, to move in new directions and form new assemblages not otherwise possible when considered separately.

This book is about the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic. In it, the author argues that the definition of the fantastic presented by Tzvetan Todorov in 1970 can be used, provided it is first adapted to a media-ecological framework, to theorize the role of aesthetic participation in the creation of secondary worlds. Working within a hermeneutical tradition, Todorov understands reader participation as interpretation, in which the creative ambiguities of the literary object are primarily epistemological. However, it is here argued that the aesthetic object of the fantastic is also characterized by material ambiguity. The purpose of this dissertation is then to present a conceptual framework with which to theorize the relation between the material and the epistemological ambiguity of the fantastic. It is argued that such a framework can be found in an ecological understanding of aesthetic participation. This, in turn, entails understanding human subjectivity as a process always already embodied in a material environment. To this extent, the proposed theoretical framework questions the clear and oppositional distinction between form and matter, as well as that between mind and body, nature and culture, and human and non-human, on which a modern and humanist notion of subjectivity is based. And in this sense, the basic ecological assumptions of this dissertation are posthumanist, or non-humanist. From this position, it is argued that an ecological understanding of participation offers a means to reformulate the function of a number of concepts central to studying the aesthetics of the fantastic, most notably the concepts of media, genre and text. As the fantastic focuses on the creation of other worlds, it is an aesthetics of coming into being, of ontogenesis. Accordingly, it will be argued that the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic operationalizes the ontogenesis of media, genres and texts. By mapping the ontogenesis of three distinct media ecologies – the media ecology of fantasy and J. R. R. Tolkien’s secondary world Middle-earth; the media ecology of the American comic book superhero Miracleman; and the media ecology of William Blake – this book argues that the ecological imagination generates world. Per Israelson has been a doctoral candidate in the Research School of Studies in Cultural History at the department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Ecologies of the Imagination is his dissertation.

Central to animal studies is the question of words and how they are used in relation to wordless beings such as non-human animals. This issue is addressed by the writer D.H. Lawrence, and the focus of this thesis is the linguistic vulnerability of humans and non-humans in his novel Women in Love, a subject that will be explored with the help of the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s text The Animal That Therefore I Am. The argument is that Women in Love illustrates the human subjection to and constitution in language, which both enables human thinking and restricts the human ability to think without words. This linguistic vulnerability causes a similar vulnerability in non-human animals in two ways. First, humans tend to imagine others, including non-verbal animals, through words, a medium they exist outside of and therefore cannot be defined through. Second, humans are often unperceptive of non-linguistic means of expression and they therefore do not discern what non-human animals may be trying to communicate to them, which often enables humans to justify abuse against non-humans. In addition, the novel shows how this shared but unequal vulnerability can sometimes be dissolved through the likewise shared but equal physical vulnerability of all animals if a human is able to imagine the experiences of a non-human animal through their shared embodiment rather than through human language. Hence the essay shows the importance of recognizing the limitations of language and of being aware of how the symbolizing effect of words influences the human treatment of its others.

The dissertation traces the trope of the incomplete character in four twentieth-century cosmopolitan novels that reflect European colonialism in a global context. I argue that, by creating characters sharply aware of the insufficiency of the Self and thus constantly seeking the constitutive participation of the Other, the four authors E. M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Congwen Shen all dramatize the incomplete character as an agent of postcolonial resistance to Western humanism that, tending to enforce the divide between the Self and the Other, provided the epistemological basis for the emergence of European colonialism. For example, Fielding's good-willed aspiration to forge cross-cultural friendship in A Passage to India; Murphy's dogged search for recognition of his Irish identity in Murphy; Susan's unfailing compassion to restore Friday's lost speech in Foe; and Changshun Teng, the Chinese orange-grower's warm-hearted generosity toward his customers in Long River--all these textual occasions dramatize the incomplete character's anxiety over the Other's rejection that will impair the fullness of his or her being, rendering it solitary and empty. I relate this anxiety to the theory of "posthumanism" advanced by such thinkers as Marx, Bakhtin, Sartre, and Lacan; in their texts the humanist view of the individual as an autonomous constitution has undergone a transformation marked by the emphasis on locating selfhood not in the insular and static Self but in the mutable middle space connecting the Self and the Other.