Download or read book George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Psychology written by Michael Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his study of Eliot as a psychological novelist, Michael Davis examines Eliot's writings in the context of a large volume of nineteenth-century scientific writing about the mind. Eliot, Davis argues, manipulated scientific language in often subversive ways to propose a vision of mind as both fundamentally connected to the external world and radically isolated from and independent of that world. In showing the alignments between Eliot's work and the formulations of such key thinkers as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and G. H. Lewes, Davis reveals how Eliot responds both creatively and critically to contemporary theories of mind, as she explores such fundamental issues as the mind/body relationship, the mind in evolutionary theory, the significance of reason and emotion, and consciousness. Davis also points to important parallels between Eliot's work and new and future developments in psychology, particularly in the work of William James. In Middlemarch, for example, Eliot demonstrates more clearly than either Lewes or James the way the conscious self is shaped by language. Davis concludes by showing that the complexity of mind, which Eliot expresses through her imaginative use of scientific language, takes on a potentially theological significance. His book suggests a new trajectory for scholars exploring George Eliot's representations of the self in the context of science, society, and religious faith.

Download or read book George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science written by Sally Shuttleworth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-03-12 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the ways in which George Eliot's involvement with contemporary scientific theory affected the evolution of her fiction. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Comte, Spencer, Lewes, Bain, Carpenter, von Hartmann and Bernard, Dr Shuttleworth shows how, as Eliot moved from Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda, her conception of a conservative, static and hierarchical model of society gave way to a more dynamic model of social and psychological life.

Download or read book George Eliot s Grammar of Being written by Melissa Anne Raines and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Eliot’s writing process was meticulous in all of its phases, from manuscript to published text. Each of her extensive novels has a delicately crafted syntax, for she shaped her individual sentences as carefully as she wanted her public to read them. Building on the influence of Victorian psychological theory, this book explains how George Eliot consciously created subtle shocks within her grammar—reaching out to her readers beneath the levels of character and story—in her effort to inspire sympathetic response.

Download or read book The Mill on the Floss written by George Eliot and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Download or read book Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth Century Literature written by D. Birch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-05-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should we understand Victorian conflict? The Victorians were divided between multiple views of the political, religious and social issues that motivated their changing aspirations. Such debates are a fundamental aspect of the literature of the period and these essays propose new ways of understanding their significance.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot written by George Levine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition, including some new chapters, provides an essential introduction to all aspects of George Eliot's life and writing. Accessible essays by some of the most distinguished scholars of Victorian literature provide lucid and often original insights into the work of one of the most important novelists of the nineteenth century.

Download or read book The Socio Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain written by Maria K. Bachman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once an invitation and a provocation, The Socio-Literary Imaginary represents the first collection of essays to illuminate the historically and intellectually complex relationship between literary studies and sociology in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. During the ongoing emergence of what Thomas Carlyle, in "Signs of the Times" (1829), pejoratively labeled a new "Mechanical Age," Britain’s robust tradition of social thought was transformed by professionalization, institutionalization, and the birth of modern disciplinary fields. Writers and thinkers most committed to an approach grounded in empirical data and inductive reasoning, such as Harriet Martineau and John Stuart Mill, positioned themselves in relation to French positivist Auguste Comte’s recent neologism "la sociologie." Some Victorian and Edwardian novelists, George Eliot and John Galsworthy among them, became enthusiastic adopters of early sociological theory; others, including Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford, more idiosyncratically both complemented and competed with the "systems of society" proposed by their social scientific contemporaries. Chronologically bound within the period from the 1830s through the 1920s, this volume expansively reconstructs their expansive if never collective efforts. Individual essays focus on Comte, Dickens, Eliot, Ford, and Galsworthy, as well as Friedrich Engels, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Virginia Woolf, and others. The volume's introduction locates these author-specific contributions in the context of both the international intellectual history of sociology in Britain through the First World War and the interanimating intersections of sociological and literary theory from the work of Hippolyte Taine in the 1860s through the successive linguistic and digital turns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Download or read book George Eliot in Context written by Margaret Harris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prodigiously learned, alive to the massive social changes of her time, defiant of many Victorian orthodoxies, George Eliot has always challenged her readers. She is at once chronicler and analyst, novelist of nostalgia and monumental thinker. In her great novel Middlemarch she writes of 'that tempting range of relevancies called the universe'. This volume identifies a range of 'relevancies' that inform both her fictional and her non-fictional writings. The range and scale of her achievement are brought into focus by cogent essays on the many contexts - historical, intellectual, political, social, cultural - to her work. In addition there are discussions of her critical history and legacy, as well as of the material conditions of production and distribution of her novels and her journalism. The volume enables fuller understanding and appreciation, from a twenty-first-century standpoint, of the life and work of one of the nineteenth century's major writers.

Download or read book Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850 1880 written by Rick Rylance and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2000 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian psychology was fiercely controversial and contested by parties representing the whole span of nineteenth-century opinion. It developed from a theory of the soul to one which understood the human mind as a part of the natural world. In its most advanced forms it embraced new evolutionary ideas, and was considered by its opponents to be a bastard child of materialism. But this was a genuinely interdisciplinary field, and bio-medical scientists, philosophers, novelists, poets, theologians, social commentators, and doctors fought for the ascendancy of their ideas. The emerging discipline reveals the turbulence of Victorian cultural debate, for psychology carried the weight of the periods concerns and articulated some of its most advanced thinking. This book examines psychological theory as it appeared to the Victorians themselves, tracing the social and intellectual forces in play in its formation; it also relates these nineteenth-century ideas to twentieth-centurydevelopments in psychological investigation. Part One outlines the general debate. Part Two concentrates on three central figures: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes. It assesses their contributions in the context of the public debates which shaped their work. This is the first detailed study of the development of a mature body of complex interdisciplinary theory often neglected by modern commentators. It also provides one of the first thorough examinations of the work of G. H. Lewes, which has been greatly underestimated. Distinctive features of this study include its cross-referral between work in different disciplines, and a series of analyses of the work of George Eliot, whose writing is saturated with ideas developed alongside those of the great psychologists who formed her circle.

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth Century British Literature and Science written by John Holmes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne Austen Wharton and George Eliot written by Maya Higashi Wakana and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-27 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne, Austen, Wharton, and George Eliot analyzes literary reproductions of everyday intimacies through a microsociological lens to demonstrate the value of reading microsocially. The text investigates the interplay between author, character, and reader and considers such concepts as face and moments of embarrassment to emphasize how art and life are inseparable. Drawing on narrative theory, the phenomenological approach, and macro approaches, Maya Higashi Wakana examines Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Wharton’s Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this book provides new ways of reading the everyday in literature.

Download or read book A Companion to George Eliot written by Amanda Anderson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers students and scholars of Eliot’s work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, reflecting the latest developments in literary criticism. It features innovative analysis ­exploring the relation between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual sensibilities and those of our own era. A comprehensive collection of essays written by leading Eliot scholars Offers a contemporary reappraisals of Eliot’s work reflecting a broad range of current academic interests, including religion, science, ethics, politics, and aesthetics Reflects the very latest developments in literary scholarship Traces the revealing links between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual ­concerns and those of today

Download or read book Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel written by Vanessa L. Ryan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Thinking Through Style written by Michael D. Hurley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is 'style', and how does it relate to thought in language? It has often been treated as something merely linguistic, independent of thought, ornamental; stylishness for its own sake. Or else it has been said to subserve thought, by mimicking, delineating, or heightening ideas that are already expressed in the words. This ambitious and timely book explores a third, more radical possibility in which style operates as a verbal mode of thinking through. Rather than figure thought as primary and pre-verbal, and language as a secondary delivery system, style is conceived here as having the capacity to clarify or generate thinking. The book's generic focus is on non-fiction prose, and it looks across the long nineteenth century. Leading scholars survey twenty authors to show where writers who have gained reputations as either 'stylists' or as 'thinkers' exploit the interplay between 'the what' and 'the how' of their prose. The study demonstrates how celebrated stylists might, after all, have thoughts worth attending to, and that distinguished thinkers might be enriched for us if we paid more due to their style. More than reversing the conventional categories, this innovative volume shows how 'style' and 'thinking' can be approached as a shared concern. At a moment when, especially in nineteenth-century studies, interest in style is re-emerging, this book revaluates some of the most influential figures of that age, re-imagining the possible alliances, interplays, and generative tensions between thinking, thinkers, style, and stylists.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830 1914 written by Joanne Shattock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A volume of essays on Victorian themes, genres and authors, aimed at students and lecturers.

Download or read book Mindful Aesthetics written by Chris Danta and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few decades, literary critics have increasingly drawn insights from cognitive neuroscience to deepen and clarify our understanding of literary representations of mind. This cognitive turn has been equally generative and contentious. While cognitive literary studies has reinforced how central the concept of mind is to aesthetic practice from the classical period to the present, critics have questioned its literalism and selective borrowing of scientific authority. Mindful Aesthetics presents both these perspectives as part of a broader consideration of the ongoing and vital importance of shifting concepts of mind to both literary and critical practice. This collection contributes to the forging of a 'new interdisciplinarity,' to paraphrase Alan Richardson's recent preface to the Neural Sublime, that is more concerned with addressing how, rather than why, we should navigate the increasingly narrow gap between the humanities and the sciences.

Download or read book George Eliot and Herbert Spencer written by Nancy L. Paxton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis of the writings of two major Victorian intellectuals examines the crucial place of gender in the larger Victorian debate about nature, religion, and evolutionary theory. Demonstrating the primacy of Herbert Spencer's influence on George Eliot's thought, Nancy Paxton discloses the continuous dialogue between this profoundly learned novelist and one of the most formidable and influential scientific authorities of her time. Using rarely cited first editions of Spencer's published works, Paxton reveals that Eliot and Spencer initially agreed in supporting several of the goals of early Victorian feminism when they met in 1851. Paxton surveys all of Spencer's writing to show when and why he repudiated his early feminism and demonstrates Eliot's determined resistance to the most conservative tendencies of evolutionary theory in her representation of female sexuality, motherhood, feminist ambition, and desire. In comparing Eliot's and Spencer's evolutionary "reconstruction of gender," the book draws on a wide variety of biographical, literary, and critical texts and on interdisciplinary scholarship about the relation between scientific and literary discourse in the nineteenth century. By thus reassessing Eliot's contribution to feminist thought, it presents a revolutionary reading of her novels which is informed by contemporary feminist criticism and the new historicism. "This is an important book because of the questions it raises, the issues it covers, and the illumination it brings to Eliot and Spencer and to crucial problems in the nineteenth century: Paxton looks at the ways scientific data get turned into arguments about the nature of women in society, about women and education, about women and sexuality. This work shows how truly current Eliot's novels are, no matter what their setting."--Barry Qualls, Rutgers University Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.