Sven Wagner: The Scientist as God: A Typological Study of a Literary Motif, 1818 to the Present.

• Julia Kuehn

The figure of the scientist as God – of a mortal who rivals divinity by engaging in projects that create, manipulate and/or discontinue life – has always been a popular one, and Wagner’s study constitutes the first “systematic exploration of the motif […] in [the] Anglophone literature” of 1818–2009. In order to bring the thirty-plus primary texts – chosen with respect to the centrality of the motif and to its explicit mention in the text – into a manageable framework, Wagner organises his study according to the different types, or modalities, in which the motif finds representation. Chapter 2 looks at the tragic mode, and Wagner makes the interesting observation that about half of his primary texts qualify for inclusion in this category. The chapter moves swiftly, after a definition of tragedy from Aristotle to Northrop Frye and beyond, through brief mentions of more or less well-known texts by Hervey, Aldiss, Crichton, Cummins, Koontz, Kellett, Carr, Lovecraft, Maugham and Carter, to more sustained analyses of Geier’s “Floating Lords”, Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” and Melville’s “The Bell-Tower”.