Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) presciently narrates the unequally felt ecological, physiological, and social precarity of anthropogenic change. The novella’s self-contained titular space offers a microcosm of the developing Anthropocene age Wells perceived. When a shipwreck strands the narrator-protagonist with vivisected beings, Edward Prendick, whose class, race, and gender privilege had previously insulated him, must confront the consequences of longstanding scientific, technological, and commercial practices that produce environmental disruption under industrial-imperialist capitalism. Prendick must reevaluate human identity and his own place in relation to other animate agents in the world. Moreau’s project amalgamates creatures of varied species and ecological milieux toward the goal of generalized anthropomorphosis, erasing difference and variation and violently dissevering animal life (human and non-) from established environmental systems. The Beast Folk’s violent reversion reasserts not a generalized animality but instead species and individual particularity.</jats:p>