Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste.

Contents: Introduction; What does brutal language mean?; The voice of the people: Marie Corelli, the romance, and the language of the masses; Savage articulations in the romances of Grant Allen; The law and the larynx: R.L. Garner, H.G. Wells, and dehumanization of language; Standard English at stake in Stoker's Dracula; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

Christine Ferguson is Lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.