Exotic Prehistory or Relevant Science? Post-human Subversion of Prehistoric Travel Narratives in Neo-Victorian Literature

The growing fascination with fossils, new discoveries in evolutionary biology and a heightened curiosity with the prehistoric past had manifested in the works of Victorian writers, especially in the fiction written by Jules Verne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Such stories modified the adventure novel to popularise the “dinosaur” in the public imagination. This study aims to analyse A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1874) and The Lost World (1912), along with their neo-Victorian retellings and adaptations, in accordance with contemporary palaeontological data. To that extent, it gauges the scientific authenticity of these texts, which is often intertwined with the Western Humanist tendency to exoticise distant lands as the domain of the Other. This chapter looks at the genre of travel narratives as an aspect of the colonising self, to offer a post-human counter-gaze to the same through Sukumar Ray’s nonsense prose Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary (1922) as well as at the use of scientific paralanguage and Latinisation to deconstruct the idea of nomenclature through Ray’s hybridised jargon, infused with Bengali and Latin elements. Finally, it looks at the speculative creatures of Ray’s world which seem to be exaggerated satires on known fossil specimens, thereby raising questions about the absolute belief in scientific endeavour which often characterise Victorian and neo-Victorian travel narratives.