Dead from the waist down : scholars and scholarship in literature and the popular imagination / A.D. Nuttall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nuttall, A. D. (Anthony David)

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Casaubon, Isaac, 1559-1614.

Casaubon, Isaac.

Browning, Robert, 1812-1889. Grammarian's funeral.

Browning, Robert.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880--Characters--Scholars.

Eliot, George.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880. Middlemarch.

Pattison, Mark, 1813-1884.

Pattison, Mark.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880.

Learning and scholarship--Moral and ethical aspects.

Learning and scholarship.

Classicists--Great Britain--Biography.

Classicists.

Scholars.

Great Britain.

Learning and scholarship in literature.

Scholars--Great Britain--Biography.

Scholars in literature.

Great Britain--Intellectual life--19th century.

Intellectual life.

Genre:

Biographies.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xii, 228 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [2003]

Summary:

At the end of the sixteenth century, scholars and intellectuals were seen as Faustian magicians, dangerous and sexy. By the nineteenth century, they were perceived as dusty and dried up, "dead from the waist down," as Browning so wickedly put it. In this erudite and entertaining book, a renowned literary critic explores the various ways we have thought about scholars and scholarship through the ages. A.D. Nuttall focuses on three people, two real and one fictitious: the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon who lived from 1559 to 1614; Mark Pattison, nineteenth-century rector at Oxford; and Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. The three are intricately related, for Pattison was seen by many as the model for Eliot's Mr. Casaubon, and he was also the author of the best book on Isaac Casaubon. Nuttall offers a penetrating interpretation of Middlemarch and then describes how Pattison recorded his own introverted intellectual life and self-lacerating depression. He presents Isaac Casaubon, on the other hand, as a fulfilled scholar who personifies the ideal of detailed, unspectacular truth-telling, often imperiled in our own culture. Nuttall concludes with a meditation on morality, sexuality, and the true virtues of scholarship.

Contents:

Introduction : desiccation and descent

Browning's confusion

Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch

Mark Pattison

Isaac Casaubon : the real thing

Conclusion : the other sexuality and the morality of scholarship.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-221) and index.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0300098405

OCLC:

52165801