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Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science

Author: David Sweeney Coombs

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2019-11-19

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0813943434

The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

Author: Leah Price

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-04-09

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1400842182

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How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Embodied

Author: William A. Cohen

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0816650128

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"In these elegant engagements with literary works, cultural history, and critical theory, Cohen advances a phenomenological approach to embodiment, proposing that we encounter the world not through our minds or souls but through our senses."--BOOK JACKET.

The Physiology of the Novel

Author: Nicholas Dames

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2007-09-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0191607274

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How did the Victorians read novels? Nicholas Dames answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading, He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine - as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, The Physiology of the Novel challenges our assumptions about what novel-reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.

Victorian Skin

Author: Pamela K. Gilbert

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1501731602

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In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.

The Science of Character

Author: S. Pearl Brilmyer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0226815781

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"In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features-shapes, colors, and gestures-come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. In the hands of these authors, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the universal laws governing human life. The Science of Character offers brilliant insights into important novels of the period, including Eliot's Middlemarch, and a fuller picture of English realism during the crucial span between 1870 and 1920"--

The Age of Analogy

Author: Devin Griffiths

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2016-10-28

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1421420775

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How did literature shape nineteenth-century science? Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles, were the two most important evolutionary theorists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although their ideas and methods differed, both Darwins were prolific and inventive writers: Erasmus composed several epic poems and scientific treatises, while Charles is renowned both for his collected journals (now titled The Voyage of the Beagle) and for his masterpiece, The Origin of Species. In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths argues that the Darwins’ writing style was profoundly influenced by the poets, novelists, and historians of their era. The Darwins, like other scientists of the time, labored to refashion contemporary literary models into a new mode of narrative analysis that could address the contingent world disclosed by contemporary natural science. By employing vivid language and experimenting with a variety of different genres, these writers gave rise to a new relational study of antiquity, or “comparative historicism,” that emerged outside of traditional histories. It flourished instead in literary forms like the realist novel and the elegy, as well as in natural histories that explored the continuity between past and present forms of life. Nurtured by imaginative cross-disciplinary descriptions of the past—from the historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson—this novel understanding of history fashioned new theories of natural transformation, encouraged a fresh investment in social history, and explained our intuition that environment shapes daily life. Drawing on a wide range of archival evidence and contemporary models of scientific and literary networks, The Age of Analogy explores the critical role analogies play within historical and scientific thinking. Griffiths also presents readers with a new theory of analogy that emphasizes language's power to foster insight into nature and human society. The first comparative treatment of the Darwins’ theories of history and their profound contribution to the study of both natural and human systems, this book will fascinate students and scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and the history of science.

Notework

Author: Simon Reader

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1503627977

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Notework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused. Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures.

Victorian Soundscapes

Author: John M. Picker

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003-09-04

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780195151916

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Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. John Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the Victorian sense of aural discovery.

The Question of the Aesthetic

Author: George Levine

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-06-16

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0192659316

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This book establishes an argument for deeper attention to the aesthetic qualities of literature, to the question of the relation between the aesthetic and more immediate, practical, and urgent social and political matters. It attempts to establish the intrinsic value of the aesthetic at the same time as it demonstrates that focus on the aesthetic does not preclude attention of the urgent questions with which works of art consistently engaged. It argues that attention to the aesthetic does not diminish attention to these larger issues, but in effect increases the power both of art and criticism to engage them fruitfully.