Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Anne DeWitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110724515X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
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.

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Anne DeWitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110724515X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Anne De Witt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781107247963
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel

Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Anne DeWitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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

Jesus in the Victorian Novel

Jesus in the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Jessica Ann Hughes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350278173
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
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.

Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press

Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press PDF Author: Will Tattersdill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107144655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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

The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science

The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science PDF Author: John Holmes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317042344
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
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.

Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable

Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable PDF Author: Sarah C. Alexander
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981882
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
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.

Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction

Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction PDF Author: Kevin A. Morrison
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476669031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
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.

The Divine in the Commonplace

The Divine in the Commonplace PDF Author: Amy M. King
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108492959
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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

Human Forms

Human Forms PDF Author: Ian Duncan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691194181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
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.