Moral Authority Men Of Science And The Victorian Novel

Author : Anne DeWitt
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2013-07-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107245150

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Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel by Anne DeWitt Pdf

Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment. Revising the widespread assumption that Victorian science and literature were part of one culture, she argues that the professionalization of science prompted novelists to deny that science offered widely accessible moral benefits. Instead, they represented the narrow aspirations of the professional as morally detrimental while they asserted that moral concerns were the novel's own domain of professional expertise. This book draws on works of natural theology, popular lectures, and debates from the pages of periodicals to delineate changes in the status of science and to show how both familiar and neglected works of Victorian fiction sought to redefine the relationship between science and the novel.

Author : Anne De Witt
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : English fiction
ISBN : 1107247969

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Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel by Anne De Witt Pdf

Author : Anne DeWitt
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2013-07-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107036178

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Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel by Anne DeWitt Pdf

Anne DeWitt examines how Victorian novelists challenged the claims of men of science to align scientific practice with moral excellence.

Author : Jessica Ann Hughes
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2022-01-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781350278172

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Jesus in the Victorian Novel by Jessica Ann Hughes Pdf

This book tells the story of how nineteenth-century writers turned to the realist novel in order to reimagine Jesus during a century where traditional religious faith appeared increasingly untenable. Re-workings of the canonical Gospels and other projects to demythologize the story of Jesus are frequently treated as projects aiming to secularize and even discredit traditional Christian faith. The novels of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Mary Augusta Ward, however, demonstrate that the work of bringing the Christian tradition of prophet, priest, and king into conversation with a rapidly changing world can at times be a form of authentic faith-even a faith that remains rooted in the Bible and historic Christianity, while simultaneously creating a space that allows traditional understandings of Jesus' identity to evolve.

Author : Will Tattersdill
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2016-03-29
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781107144651

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Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press by Will Tattersdill Pdf

Explores the first appearance of 'science fiction' in the pages of late nineteenth-century general interest periodicals.

Author : John Holmes,Sharon Ruston
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2017-05-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317042341

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The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science by John Holmes,Sharon Ruston Pdf

Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.

Author : Sarah C. Alexander
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2015-06-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780822981886

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Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable by Sarah C. Alexander Pdf

The Victorians are known for their commitment to materialism, evidenced by the dominance of empiricism in the sciences and realism in fiction. Yet there were other strains of thinking during the period in the physical sciences, social sciences, and literature that privileged the spaces between the material and immaterial. This book examines how the emerging language of the “imponderable” helped Victorian writers and physicists make sense of new experiences of modernity. As Sarah Alexander argues, while Victorian physicists were theorizing ether, energy and entropy, and non-Euclidean space and atom theories, writers such as Charles Dickens, William Morris, and Joseph Conrad used concepts of the imponderable to explore key issues of capitalism, imperialism, and social unrest.

Author : Kevin A. Morrison
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2018-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781476669038

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Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction by Kevin A. Morrison Pdf

This companion to Victorian popular fiction includes more than 300 cross-referenced entries on works written for the British mass market. Biographical sketches cover the writers and their publishers, the topics that concerned them and the genres they helped to establish or refine. Entries introduce readers to long-overlooked authors who were widely read in their time, with suggestions for further reading and emerging resources for the study of popular fiction.

Author : Ian Duncan
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2019-09-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780691194189

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Human Forms by Ian Duncan Pdf

A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science The 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains. Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such as the Romantic bildungsroman; historical novels by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a fixed human nature; Charles Dickens's transformist aesthetic and its challenge to Victorian realism; and George Eliot's reckoning with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing the new set of divisions—between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life—that replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul. The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with "the natural history of man" from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era, Human Forms sets a new standard for work on natural history and the novel.

Author : Amy M. King
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2019-07-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108492959

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The Divine in the Commonplace by Amy M. King Pdf

Explores how natural theology features in both early Victorian natural histories and English provincial realist novels of the same period.

Author : Melissa Shields Jenkins
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2016-04-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317136309

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Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907 by Melissa Shields Jenkins Pdf

During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father’s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches, and professional writing in the fields of history and science, Jenkins offers interdisciplinary case studies of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. Jenkins’s book contributes to our understanding of the part played by fathers in the Victorian cultural imagination, and sheds new light on the structures underlying the Victorian novel.

Author : Vanessa L. Ryan
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2012-06-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781421405919

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Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel by Vanessa L. Ryan Pdf

In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds. Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.

Author : Rob Boddice
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2016-11-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780252099021

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The Science of Sympathy by Rob Boddice Pdf

In his Descent of Man , Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin's ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged procreation by the "fit" alone. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualized obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.

Author : George Levine
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : English literature
ISBN : 0511437900

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Realism, Ethics and Secularism by George Levine Pdf

Author : Alan Rauch
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2001-07-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780822383154

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Useful Knowledge by Alan Rauch Pdf

Nineteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of publications and institutions devoted to the creation and the dissemination of knowledge: encyclopedias, scientific periodicals, instruction manuals, scientific societies, children’s literature, mechanics’ institutes, museums of natural history, and lending libraries. In Useful Knowledge Alan Rauch presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this new knowledge industry and traces its relationships within nineteenth-century literature, ending with its eventual confrontation with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Rauch discusses both the influence and the ideology of knowledge in terms of how it affected nineteenth-century anxieties about moral responsibility and religious beliefs. Drawing on a wide array of literary, scientific, and popular works of the period, the book focusses on the growing importance of scientific knowledge and its impact on Victorian culture. From discussions of Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy! and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Rauch paints a fascinating picture of nineteenth-century culture and addresses issues related to the proliferation of knowledge and the moral issues of this time period. Useful Knowledge touches on social and cultural anxieties that offer both historical and contemporary insights on our ongoing preoccupation with knowledge. Useful Knowledge will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth century history, literature, culture, the mediation of knowledge, and the history of science.