Jessica Krzeminski - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Saint-Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design
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Papers by Jessica Krzeminski
This dissertation, “Disrupting Homogeneity: Geology’s Living Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Litera... more This dissertation, “Disrupting Homogeneity: Geology’s Living Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Literature” contends that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, originated in On the Origin of Species (1859), was a culturally disruptive force because it presented all species, including and especially the human, as mutable, unstable, and unfixed. This vision of endless transformation, fluidity, and change was unsettling, especially from a Christian point of view. Within a few decades, however, Darwin’s theories were normalized, if not universally accepted; at this point, his concept of the “living fossil”—an organism that closely resembles its ancestors because it has hardly changed at a genomic level—reemerged in scientific texts. Debates about whether genetically unchanged species really exist have followed us to our present. The living fossil has captured the cultural and scientific imagination precisely because it proposes unchangingness in the face of mutability; in other words, where ...
Victorians Institute Journal
The mermaid is at once a figure for the hybridity of bodies and, ultimately, for the hybridity of... more The mermaid is at once a figure for the hybridity of bodies and, ultimately, for the hybridity of time. In bringing the Victorian mermaid into our contemporary moment with The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (2018), Imogen Hermes Gowar revisits Victorian questions about the individuality and boundedness of the human body that are even more pressing when environmental catastrophes are revealing our interconnectedness on both spatial and temporal scales. Pairing Gowar’s novel with Edith Nesbit’s Wet Magic (1913) illustrates that Victorian worries about national character and national superiority that arose because of new theories of evolution and geology, as well as the expansion of empire, are reenvisioned in today’s global world through the unequal effects of environmental harm.
This dissertation, “Disrupting Homogeneity: Geology’s Living Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Litera... more This dissertation, “Disrupting Homogeneity: Geology’s Living Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Literature” contends that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, originated in On the Origin of Species (1859), was a culturally disruptive force because it presented all species, including and especially the human, as mutable, unstable, and unfixed. This vision of endless transformation, fluidity, and change was unsettling, especially from a Christian point of view. Within a few decades, however, Darwin’s theories were normalized, if not universally accepted; at this point, his concept of the “living fossil”—an organism that closely resembles its ancestors because it has hardly changed at a genomic level—reemerged in scientific texts. Debates about whether genetically unchanged species really exist have followed us to our present. The living fossil has captured the cultural and scientific imagination precisely because it proposes unchangingness in the face of mutability; in other words, where ...
Victorians Institute Journal
The mermaid is at once a figure for the hybridity of bodies and, ultimately, for the hybridity of... more The mermaid is at once a figure for the hybridity of bodies and, ultimately, for the hybridity of time. In bringing the Victorian mermaid into our contemporary moment with The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (2018), Imogen Hermes Gowar revisits Victorian questions about the individuality and boundedness of the human body that are even more pressing when environmental catastrophes are revealing our interconnectedness on both spatial and temporal scales. Pairing Gowar’s novel with Edith Nesbit’s Wet Magic (1913) illustrates that Victorian worries about national character and national superiority that arose because of new theories of evolution and geology, as well as the expansion of empire, are reenvisioned in today’s global world through the unequal effects of environmental harm.