Download or read book The Science of Character written by S. Pearl Brilmyer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how character forms. In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in 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. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, 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 laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.
Download or read book The Journals of George Eliot written by George Eliot and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-28 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great Victorian novelist's complete surviving journals - first publication of new George Eliot text.
Download or read book The Outward Mind written by Benjamin Morgan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.
Download or read book Paradise Lost written by Michael Cavanagh and published by Catholic University of America Press. This book was released on 2020-02-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A record of a teacher’s lifelong love affair with the beauty, wit, and profundity of Paradise Lost, celebrating John Milton’s un-doctrinal, complex, and therefore deeply satisfying perception of the human condition. After surveying Milton’s recurrent struggle as a reconciler of conflicting ideals, this Primer undertakes a book-by-book reading of Paradise Lost, reviewing key features of Milton’s “various style,” and why we treasure that style. Cavanagh constantly revisits Milton the singer and maker, and the artistic problems he faced in writing this almost impossible poem. This book is emphatically for first-time readers of Milton, with little or no prior exposure, but with ambition to encounter challenging poetry. These are readers who tell you they “have always been meaning to read Paradise Lost,” who seek to enjoy the epic without being overwhelmed by its daunting learning and expansive frame of reference. Avoiding the narrowly specialized focus of most Milton scholarship, Cavanagh deals forthrightly with issues that recur across generations of readers, gathering selected voices—from scholars and poets alike—from 1674 through the present. Lively and jargon-free, this Primer makes Paradise Lost accessible and fresh, offering a credible beginning to what is a great intellectual and aesthetic adventure.
Download or read book The George Eliot Letters 1869 1873 written by George Eliot and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Figure of Music in Nineteenth Century British Poetry written by Phyllis Weliver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was music depicted in and mediated through Romantic and Victorian poetry? This is the central question that this specially commissioned volume of essays sets out to explore in order to understand better music's place and its significance in nineteenth-century British culture. Analysing how music took part in and commented on a wide range of scientific, literary, and cultural discourses, the book expands our knowledge of how music was central to the nineteenth-century imagination. Like its companion volume, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Ashgate, 2004) edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, this book provides a meeting place for literary studies and musicology, with contributions by scholars situated in each field. Areas investigated in these essays include the Romantic interest in national musical traditions; the figure of the Eolian harp in the poetry of Coleridge and Shelley; the recurring theme of music in Blake's verse; settings of Tennyson by Parry and Elgar that demonstrate how literary representations of musical ideas are refigured in music; George Eliot's use of music in her poetry to explore literary and philosophical themes; music in the verse of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the personification of lyric (Sappho) in a song cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock; and music and sexual identity in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, Michael Field, Beardsley, Gray and Davidson.
Download or read book The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot Vol 1 written by Antonie Gerard van den Broek and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents George Eliot's shorter poetry. This volume includes an introduction, which discusses Eliot's interest in poetry verse and its relation to her prose and prose fiction; her recurring themes and motifs; the poetry's critical reception and its value to modern readers.
Download or read book Gambling in the Nineteenth Century English Novel written by Michael Flavin and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the theme of gambling in a range of 19th-century English novels. It examines the representation of gambling in the novels, the role that gambling played in the lives of the novelists, and gambling in the novels within the context of the development of Victorian society.
Download or read book Victorian Women s Fiction written by Shirley Foster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Focusing on the ways in which female novelists have challenged contemporary assumptions about their own sex, this book's critical interest in women's fiction shows how 19th century women writers confront the conflict between the pressures of matrimonial ideologies and alternative of single or professional life.
Download or read book The Reader s Adviser and Bookman s Manual written by and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 1144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Senses of Vibration written by Shelley Trower and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering study of the phenomenon of vibration and its history and reception through culture.
Download or read book When Fiction Feels Real written by Elaine Auyoung and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do readers claim that fictional worlds feel real? How can certain literary characters seem capable of leading lives of their own, outside the stories in which they appear? What makes the experience of reading a novel uniquely pleasurable and what do readers lose when this experience comes to an end? Since their first publication, nineteenth-century realist novels like Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina have inspired readers to describe literary experience as gaining access to vibrant fictional worlds and becoming friends with fictional characters. While this effect continues to be central to the experience of reading realist fiction and later works in this tradition, the capacity for novels to evoke persons and places in a reader's mind has often been taken for granted and even dismissed as a naive phenomenon unworthy of critical attention. When Fiction Feels Real provides literary studies with new tools for thinking about the phenomenology of reading by bringing narrative techniques into conversation with psychological research on reading and cognition. Through close readings of classic novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy, and the elegies of Thomas Hardy, Elaine Auyoung reveals what nineteenth-century writers know about how reading works. Building on well-established research on the mind, Auyoung exposes the underpinnings of the seemingly impossible achievement of realist fiction, introducing new perspectives on narrative theory, mimesis, and fictionality. When Fiction Feels Real changes the way we think about literary language, realist aesthetics, and the reading process, opening up a new field of inquiry centered on the relationship between fictional representation and comprehension.
Download or read book The British National Bibliography written by Arthur James Wells and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 1160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Reader s Adviser English Literature written by Winifred F. Courtney and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The George Eliot Letters written by George Eliot and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Reader s Adviser written by Winifred F. Courtney and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot Vol 2 written by Antonie Gerard van den Broek and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents George Eliot's shorter poetry. This volume includes an introduction, which discusses Eliot's interest in poetry verse and its relation to her prose and prose fiction; her recurring themes and motifs; the poetry's critical reception and its value to modern readers.
