Includes bibliographical (pages 249-273) references and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Ethology, or the science of character -- Plasticity, form, and the physics of character in Eliot's Middlemarch -- Sensing character in Impressions of Theophrastus Such -- The racialization of surface in Hardy's Sketch of temperament and hereditary science -- Schopenhauer and the determination of women's character -- The intimate pulse of reality; or, Schreiner's ethological realism -- Coda: Spontaneous generations of character between realism and modernism.
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.