Download or read book Victorian Minds written by Gertrude Himmelfarb and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1995 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of intellectuals in crisis and of ideologies in transition, elegant in style and thought. "Few works that I know convey the excitement of the intellectual life of 19th-century England as immediately....The essays are remarkable no less for the cogency of their wit than for the range and precision of their scholarship." --Lionel Trilling.
Download or read book High Minds written by Simon Heffer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian Age—and the Victorian mind—by a master historian. Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest, and uncertainty; there were attempts to assassinate the queen and her prime minister; and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialization but by new attitudes to politics, education, women, and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people—politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers—who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. High Minds explores this process of transformation as it traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the fate of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. The narrative analyzes the birth of new attitudes in education, religion, and science. And High Minds shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture collided with broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the "great projects” of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced portrait into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people—and show how the Victorians’ pursuit of perfection gave birth to the modern Britain we know today.
Download or read book Mesmerized written by Alison Winter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-12 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: An Invitation to the Seance1: Discovery of the Island of Mesmeria 2: Animal Magnetism Comes to London 3: Experimental Subjects as Scientific Instruments 4: Carnival, Chapel, and Pantomime 5: The Peripatetic Power of the "New Science" 6: Consultations, Conversaziones, and Institutions 7: The Invention of Anesthesia and the Redefinition of Pain 8: Colonizing Sensations in Victorian India9: Emanations from the Sickroom 10: The Mesmeric Cure of Souls 11: Expertise, Common Sense, and the Territories of Science 12: The Social Body and the Invention of Consensus Conclusion: The Day after the Feast Notes Bibliography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book The Marriage of Minds written by Rachel Ablow and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Marriage of Minds examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life. Through close readings of canonical texts in relation to the histories of sympathy, marriage, and reading, The Marriage of Minds begins to fill a long-standing gap between eighteenth-century philosophical notions of sympathy and twentieth-century psychoanalytic concepts of identification. It examines the wide variety of ways in which novels were understood to educate or reform readers in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it demonstrates how both the form of the Victorian novel and the experience supposed to result from that form were implicated in ongoing debates about the nature, purpose, and law of marriage.
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 How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain written by Leah Price and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-27 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Japan in the Victorian Mind written by Toshio Yokoyama and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1987-03-29 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface - Chronological Table - List of Illustrations - List of Abbreviations - Map of Japan - Introduction - This Singular Country: British Writers' Thoughts in the Early 1850s on the Future Anglo-Japanese Encounter - Japan and the Edinburgh Publishers, William Blackwood and Sons - Britain, the Happy Suitor of a Fairy Land: About 1860, Immediately after the Conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Commercial Treaty - Britain, the Suitor Disillusioned with Japan: In the Last Years of the Tokugawa Regime - In Quest of the Inner Life of the Japanese: The Era of Algernon Bertram Mitford, 1869-72 - The Strange History of this Strange Country: The 1870s, a Decade of Zealous Westernization - Young Japan versus Great Britain: The Reinforcement of the Idea of Britain's Remoteness from Japan - Victorian Travellers in the Elf-land Japan: Their Wish to Fall in Love with Old Japan, 1870-80 - Conclusion - Selected Bibliography - Index
Download or read book The Starry Sky Within written by Anna Henchman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing unexplored connections between nineteenth-century astronomy and literature, The Starry Sky Within offers a new understanding of literary point of view as essentially multiple, mobile, and comparative. Nineteenth-century astronomy revealed a cosmos of celestial systems in constant motion. Stars, comets, planets, and moons coursed through space in complex and changing relation. As the skies were in motion, so too was the human subject. Astronomers showed that human beings never perceive the world from a stable position. The mobility of our bodies in space and the very structure of stereoscopic vision mean that point of view is neither singular nor stable. We always see the world as an amalgam of fractured perspectives. In this innovative study, Henchman shows that the reconceptualization of the skies gave poets and novelists new spaces in which to indulge their longing to escape the limitations of individual perspective. She links astronomy and optics to the form of the multiplot novel, with its many centers of consciousness, complex systems of relation, and criss-crossing points of view. Accounts of a world and a subject both in relative motion shaped the form of grand-scale narratives such as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Bleak House, and Daniel Deronda. De Quincey, Tennyson, and Eliot befriended leading astronomers and visited observatories, while Hardy learned about astronomy from the vast popular literature of the day. These writers use cosmic distances to dislodge their readers from the earth, setting human perception against views from high above and then telescoping back to earth again. What results is a new perception of the mobility of point of view in both literature and science.
Download or read book Mind Controllers written by Armen Victorian and published by Frog Limited. This book was released on 1999-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mind Controllers reveals the shocking details about experiments on unwitting subjects conducted by government researchers from the CIA to the Pentagon.
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 Queen Victoria s Skull written by David Stack and published by Bloomsbury Continuum. This book was released on 2008-08-02 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hugely entertaining study that goes beyond biography to vividly portray Victorian life in a wider framework.
Download or read book Allegories of One s Own Mind written by David G. Riede and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One's Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet's own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy"-we might refer to it as depression-and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive. David G. Riede argues that the dominant thematic and formal concerns of the age, in fact, are embodied in the ambivalence of Carlyle, Arnold, and others, who pitted a Victorian ideology of duty, rationality, and high moral character against a still compelling Romantic cultivation of the deep self intuited as melancholy. Such ambivalence, in fact, is in itself constitutive of melancholy, long understood as the product of conscience raging against inchoate desire, and it constitutes the mood of the age's most important poetry, represented here in the major works of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even in the notoriously "optimistic" Robert Browning. David G. Riede is professor of English at The Ohio State University.
Download or read book Mrs Jeffries Speaks Her Mind written by Emily Brightwell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eccentric Olive Kettering swore someone was trying to harm her. Too bad no one listened, though plenty wanted her dead. When Olive is shot and killed, Mrs. Jeffries has no problem speaking her mind to see justice served.
Download or read book The New Prometheans written by Courtenay Raia and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-12-04 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.
Download or read book Victorian Science in Context written by Bernard Lightman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-10 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Science in Context captures the essence of this fascination, charting the many ways in which science influenced and was influenced by the larger Victorian culture. Leading scholars in history, literature, and the history of science explore questions such as, What did science mean to the Victorians? For whom was Victorian science written? What ideological messages did it convey?
Download or read book Primitive Minds written by Anna Neill and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the work of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hardy to bring together Victorian evolutionary theory and spiritualism.
Download or read book Africa and the Victorians written by Ronald Robinson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Imperialism in the eyes of the world is still Europe's original sin, even though the empires themselves have long since disappeared. Among the most egregious of imperial acts was Victorian Britain's seemingly random partition of Africa. In this classic work of history, a standard text for generations of students and historians now again available, the authors provide a unique account of the motives that went into the continent's partition. Distrusting mechanistic explanations in terms of economic growth or the European balance, the authors consider the intentions in the minds of the partitioners themselves. Decision by decision, the reasoning of Prime Ministers Gladstone, Salisbury and Rosebery, their advisors and opponents, is carefully analysed. The result is a history of 'imperialism in the making', not as it appeared to later commentators and historians, but as the empire-makers themselves experienced it from day to day. Featuring a new Foreword by Wm. Roger Louis, this new edition brings a classic work to a new generation and is essential reading for all students of nineteenth-century history."--Bloomsbury Publishing.
