The science of character : human objecthood and the ends of Victorian realism / S. Pearl Brilmyer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brilmyer, S. Pearl, author.

Contributor:

Clyde de Loache Ryals Endowed Acquisition Fund.

Series:

Thinking literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Characters and characteristics in literature.

Personality development.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

289 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Summary:

"In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman 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. In the hands of these authors, 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 universal laws governing human life. The Science of Character offers brilliant insights into important novels of the period, including Eliot's Middlemarch, and a fuller picture of English realism during the crucial span between 1870 and 1920"-- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: As Much an External Thing as a Tree or a Rock

A Power of Observation Informed by a Living Heart; or, Involuntary, Palpitating

Inconsistency and Formlessness

ch. 1 Plasticity, Form, and the Physics of Character in Eliot's Middlemarch

Plastic Forms

Irregular Solids, Viscous Fluids

ch. 2 Sensing Character in Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Theophrastus Who?

Descriptive Minutiae

To Sketch a Species

The Natural History of Human Life

After the Human

ch. 3 The Racialization of Surface in Hardy's Sketch of Temperament and Hereditary Science

The Color of Heredity

On the Whiteness of the Ground

Accretions of Character

ch. 4 Schopenhauer and the Determination of Women's Character

An English Start

The Character of the Will

Impulsive Aesthetics

ch. 5 The Intimate Pulse of Reality; or, Schreiner's Ethological Realism

The Ethics of Nature

The Ethics of Description

The Ethics of Force.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Clyde de Loache Ryals Endowed Acquisition Fund.

ISBN:

9780226815770

0226815773

9780226815787

0226815781

OCLC:

1241244169

Publisher Number:

99989473725