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

Published Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, [2022] ©2022

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Description 1 online resource (289 pages) : illustrations Series Thinking Literature Thinking literature. Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of figures -- Introduction. Ethology, or the Science of Character -- Chapter 1. Plasticity, Form, and the Physics of Character in Eliot's Middlemarch -- Chapter 2. Sensing Character in Impressions of Theophrastus Such -- Chapter 3. The Racialization of Surface in Hardy's Sketch of Temperament and Hereditary Science -- Chapter 4. Schopenhauer and the Determination of Women's Character -- Chapter 5. The Intimate Pulse of Reality; or, Schreiner's Ethological Realism -- Coda. Spontaneous Generations of Character between Realism and Modernism -- Acknowledgments -- Bibliography -- Index Summary The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how character forms. In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in 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. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body's inside and outside. In their hands, 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 laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version of record Subject English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism Human behavior in literature. Ethics, Modern -- 19th century. Characters and characteristics in literature. Personality development in literature. Personality development. Personality Development LITERARY CRITICISM / General. Personality development in literature Human behavior in literature Ethics, Modern Characters and characteristics in literature English literature Personality development Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 022681579X 9780226815794

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