JOURNAL ARTICLE

Heredity's Aesthetic Infrastructures.

  • Published In: Victorian Literature & Culture, 2024, v. 52, n. 2. P. 387 1 of 3

  • Database: Historical Abstracts with Full Text 2 of 3

  • Authored By: WONG, AMY R. 3 of 3

Abstract

This essay traces a disjointed aesthetics of hereditary units in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) and Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai's So Long, My Son (2019) and argues that shared social and economic conditions of Victorian Britain and postsocialist China prompt similar ruptures of social realism's totalizing aspirations. The novel and the film are mutually concerned with tragedies of biopolitical management and doomed lineages, but at the same time they both employ an aesthetics of leapings and projections—also featured in Hardy's 1917 poem "Heredity"—that argues for the value of an individual life based on a radical divestment from personhood itself, in favor of the gene's mindless jumps through unmapped space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additional Information

  • Source:Victorian Literature & Culture. 2024/06, Vol. 52, Issue 2, p387
  • Document Type:Article
  • Subject Area:Literature and Writing
  • Publication Date:2024
  • ISSN:1060-1503
  • DOI:10.1017/S1060150323000979
  • Accession Number:180679612
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