ABSTRACT

The founders of cryptozoology in the 1950s implied that their objects of investigation, animals elsewhere presumed mythical or extinct, were beyond respectable science. Back in the late eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson had been by no means idiosyncratic in believing that American fossils represented living animals. The subsequent near-consensus regarding extinction was, moreover, complicated in the mid-nineteenth century by evidence that early humans lived alongside mammoths, and by views that myths about monsters were based on human encounters with prehistoric creatures. Such creatures were soon incorporated into a genre of short horror stories. The origin of this familiar genre has rarely been considered in detail. Firstly, I explain, in a transatlantic context, why the ‘living fossil short story’ emerged when it did. Next, I argue that these stories displayed simultaneous urges, firstly, to disturb the natural order by putting the monstrous inhabitants of deep time in contact with contemporary humans, and secondly, to interrogate the directionality of nature by asking whether manly, modern St Georges can return these animals to extinction. I focus on two key examples written by American authors: Charles Jacobs Peterson’s ‘The Last Dragon’ (1871) and Wardon Allan Curtis’s ‘The Monster of Lake LaMetrie’ (1899).

摘要

20 世纪 50 年代的神秘动物学创始人暗示，他们的研究对象（其他地方被认为是神话或灭绝的动物）超出了受人尊敬的科学范围。早在十八世纪末，托马斯·杰斐逊就坚信美洲化石代表活体动物，这一点绝不是异想天开。此外，在十九世纪中叶，由于早期人类与猛犸象生活在一起的证据，以及关于怪物的神话是基于人类与史前生物的遭遇的观点，随后关于灭绝的近乎共识变得更加复杂。这些生物很快就被纳入恐怖短篇小说的流派中。这种熟悉的流派的起源很少被详细考虑。首先，我在跨大西洋背景下解释为什么“活化石短篇小说”会出现。下一个，我认为这些故事同时表现出强烈的冲动，首先，通过让远古的怪物居民与当代人类接触来扰乱自然秩序，其次，通过询问有男子气概的现代圣乔治是否可以回归这些来质疑自然的方向性。动物走向灭绝。我重点关注美国作家写的两个重要例子：查尔斯·雅各布斯·彼得森 (Charles Jacobs Peterson) 的《最后一条龙》(The Last Dragon) (1871) 和沃登·艾伦·柯蒂斯 (Wardon Allan Curtis) 的《拉梅特里湖怪物》(The Monster of Lake LaMetrie) (1899)。