British reviewers often opposed the distasteful ‘physiological’ experiments of their European neighbours while simultaneously embracing laboratory principles and methods to dissect the practice of criticism. Chapter 8 surveys the newspapers and periodicals of the period to show that vivisectional terminology was remarkably sprawling in its applications and meanings. Experimental physiology’s modus operandi was used to shape and articulate key methodological and ideological principles emerging in late-Victorian literary-critical theory and practice. Namely, allusions to ‘vivisection’ expressed a growing professionalism and a shift from an ‘illustrative’ to a dispassionate ‘analytical’ mode, paralleling the trend towards ‘scientific’ historiography. Certain authors such as George Eliot, William Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë were persistently labelled ‘literary vivisectors’, and the chapter ends by arguing that romanticised notions of the sympathetic female author presented one obstacle to objective, ‘vivisectional’ fin-de-siècle literary criticism.

Experimental physiology was exploited as a metaphor and a model for the work of authors and critics. The final two chapters advance the book’s trajectory which takes in increasingly diverse literary forms and traces how vivisection became loosened from its ethical and political contexts. Chapter 7 studies how Émile Zola and August Strindberg drew up principles of naturalism by fashioning themselves as literary vivisectors and presenting the stage and the novel as sites of experimentation. They did so by interrogating the connection between observation and intervention and by cultivating an attitude of objective absence imported from experimental physiology. By reframing their works within the context of the vivisection debates (to which naturalism was deeply indebted), the chapter offers a reconsideration of how these writers sought to uncover physiological and psychological laws that would make literature entirely scientific.