- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226481180
- eISBN:
- 9780226481173
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226481173.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter focuses on the use of evolutionary epic in popularizing science in Victorian England. It analyzes the works of David Page, Arabella Buckley, Edward Clodd, and Grant Allen, who adapted ...
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This chapter focuses on the use of evolutionary epic in popularizing science in Victorian England. It analyzes the works of David Page, Arabella Buckley, Edward Clodd, and Grant Allen, who adapted the evolutionary epic as a vehicle for communicating contemporary scientific ideas to a general reading audience. These popularizers contributed to the formulation of a literary format that is still used today. Their works were based on a template provided by Robert Chambers in his Vestiges, combined with the theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.Less
This chapter focuses on the use of evolutionary epic in popularizing science in Victorian England. It analyzes the works of David Page, Arabella Buckley, Edward Clodd, and Grant Allen, who adapted the evolutionary epic as a vehicle for communicating contemporary scientific ideas to a general reading audience. These popularizers contributed to the formulation of a literary format that is still used today. Their works were based on a template provided by Robert Chambers in his Vestiges, combined with the theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.
Ian Small
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122418
- eISBN:
- 9780191671418
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122418.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines Walter Pater's career during a time when literary critics faced a serious crisis of authority. It evaluates Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) ...
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This chapter examines Walter Pater's career during a time when literary critics faced a serious crisis of authority. It evaluates Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as well as the criticisms it received. It presents a spectrum of quoted material which in fact comprises a large proportion of the novel's overall content. It notes that Pater's principal intellectual concern was to engage with the concepts of textual and historiographical authority. It discusses how Pater was attempting to undertake the kind of critical enterprise which Grant Allen had insisted on a decade earlier. However, this was no longer possible. In Marius the Epicurean and Plato and Platonism, Pater was trying to write works in which and for which authority existed in the author alone.Less
This chapter examines Walter Pater's career during a time when literary critics faced a serious crisis of authority. It evaluates Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as well as the criticisms it received. It presents a spectrum of quoted material which in fact comprises a large proportion of the novel's overall content. It notes that Pater's principal intellectual concern was to engage with the concepts of textual and historiographical authority. It discusses how Pater was attempting to undertake the kind of critical enterprise which Grant Allen had insisted on a decade earlier. However, this was no longer possible. In Marius the Epicurean and Plato and Platonism, Pater was trying to write works in which and for which authority existed in the author alone.
Benjamin Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226442112
- eISBN:
- 9780226457468
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457468.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter discusses how a physiological model of emotion created new avenues into time-worn narratives about aesthetic experience. Focusing on five thinkers who shared an interest in describing ...
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This chapter discusses how a physiological model of emotion created new avenues into time-worn narratives about aesthetic experience. Focusing on five thinkers who shared an interest in describing aesthetic experience as an embodied affect—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—the chapter shows how physiological aesthetics challenged the notion that aesthetic judgment was necessarily a slow, reflective process of deliberation. Evolutionary theory and physiology provided tools for rescaling aesthetic response: for Grant Allen and Herbert Spencer, the experience of beauty was a reflex that had evolved slowly in evolutionary time; while for Alexander Bain, it was an immediate neurophysiological response to stimuli of form, color, or sound. This scientific discourse is manifested in later works such as Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, which experiment with the notion of aesthetic experience as involving discernible physical impressions on the nervous system.Less
This chapter discusses how a physiological model of emotion created new avenues into time-worn narratives about aesthetic experience. Focusing on five thinkers who shared an interest in describing aesthetic experience as an embodied affect—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—the chapter shows how physiological aesthetics challenged the notion that aesthetic judgment was necessarily a slow, reflective process of deliberation. Evolutionary theory and physiology provided tools for rescaling aesthetic response: for Grant Allen and Herbert Spencer, the experience of beauty was a reflex that had evolved slowly in evolutionary time; while for Alexander Bain, it was an immediate neurophysiological response to stimuli of form, color, or sound. This scientific discourse is manifested in later works such as Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, which experiment with the notion of aesthetic experience as involving discernible physical impressions on the nervous system.
Lena Wånggren
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474416269
- eISBN:
- 9781474434645
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416269.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The second chapter examines the link between the New Woman and the typewriter, a technology which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de ...
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The second chapter examines the link between the New Woman and the typewriter, a technology which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de siècle. The chapter provides a historical and literary account of both the machine and its operator, through reading fictional works as well as trade journals and other periodical press of the time. As the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif. Reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903), the chapter emphasises a kind of secretarial agency formulated in these works, in which the New Woman typist figure appropriates the typewriter as a means of self-formation.Less
The second chapter examines the link between the New Woman and the typewriter, a technology which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de siècle. The chapter provides a historical and literary account of both the machine and its operator, through reading fictional works as well as trade journals and other periodical press of the time. As the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif. Reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903), the chapter emphasises a kind of secretarial agency formulated in these works, in which the New Woman typist figure appropriates the typewriter as a means of self-formation.
Lena Wånggren
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474416269
- eISBN:
- 9781474434645
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416269.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The third chapter examines the specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. When the safety bicycle first came into widespread use in the late 1880s it became ...
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The third chapter examines the specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. When the safety bicycle first came into widespread use in the late 1880s it became connected with the New Woman and her ‘unsexing’ potential, with the loosening of social restrictions and with geographic mobility. Engaging first with medical as well as public debates around the perceived physical and social effects of the bicycle, along with guidebooks for female cyclists, the chapter moves on to consider how the bicycle through literature becomes a symbol of emancipation. Reading H. G. Wells Wheels of Chance (1897) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the chapter complicates the notion of the bicycle as a democratising ‘freedom machine’, by insisting on the class specifics of the New Woman and the commercialism of the late-Victorian literary market.Less
The third chapter examines the specific technology most commonly associated with the New Woman: the safety bicycle. When the safety bicycle first came into widespread use in the late 1880s it became connected with the New Woman and her ‘unsexing’ potential, with the loosening of social restrictions and with geographic mobility. Engaging first with medical as well as public debates around the perceived physical and social effects of the bicycle, along with guidebooks for female cyclists, the chapter moves on to consider how the bicycle through literature becomes a symbol of emancipation. Reading H. G. Wells Wheels of Chance (1897) and Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), the chapter complicates the notion of the bicycle as a democratising ‘freedom machine’, by insisting on the class specifics of the New Woman and the commercialism of the late-Victorian literary market.
Lena Wånggren
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474416269
- eISBN:
- 9781474434645
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416269.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The fin de siècle involved not only a technological modernity, but also a medical modernity: the position of the nurse changed, female doctors set up practice, and new medical technologies and ...
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The fin de siècle involved not only a technological modernity, but also a medical modernity: the position of the nurse changed, female doctors set up practice, and new medical technologies and systems of knowledge came into use. The fourth chapter considers the medical New Women who, through new diagnostic tools as well as their admission to the institutional technology of the hospital, entered new spaces and roles as nurses. It locates the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the earlier Nightingale New Style nurse. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade, A Woman With Tenacity of Purpose (1900) as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, the chapter explores the role of modern medical technologies in the formation of notions of gender, knowledge and medical authority.Less
The fin de siècle involved not only a technological modernity, but also a medical modernity: the position of the nurse changed, female doctors set up practice, and new medical technologies and systems of knowledge came into use. The fourth chapter considers the medical New Women who, through new diagnostic tools as well as their admission to the institutional technology of the hospital, entered new spaces and roles as nurses. It locates the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the earlier Nightingale New Style nurse. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade, A Woman With Tenacity of Purpose (1900) as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, the chapter explores the role of modern medical technologies in the formation of notions of gender, knowledge and medical authority.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Beginning with John Herschel’s definition of ‘science’ as a specifically impersonal kind of knowledge, this chapter focuses on the relations between the subjective and the objective, pursuing them ...
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Beginning with John Herschel’s definition of ‘science’ as a specifically impersonal kind of knowledge, this chapter focuses on the relations between the subjective and the objective, pursuing them through the work of T. H. Huxley, Claude Bernard and others. Herschel’s notion of science resonates with the ethos of self-restraint that has been claimed to be constitutive of Victorian objectivity (Daston and Galison). Yet, while some Victorian thinkers certainly subscribed to the ideal of a dispassionate spectator “dying to know” (Levine), many of them were well aware that, in reality, the life of the observer and the matter to be observed were thoroughly entwined. As the chapter shows, this awareness of a deep-seated entanglement of the investigator and the investigated resulted not only in a concern with the ways and means of drawing the personal out of the general (or vice versa), so as to separate the scientific from all that which was not supposed to be part of it. More importantly, the Victorian belief in an intimate connection between being and knowing meant that natural historians such as Huxley attended closely to an experimental field in which the making of science overlaps with questions of sensory perception and aesthetic form.Less
Beginning with John Herschel’s definition of ‘science’ as a specifically impersonal kind of knowledge, this chapter focuses on the relations between the subjective and the objective, pursuing them through the work of T. H. Huxley, Claude Bernard and others. Herschel’s notion of science resonates with the ethos of self-restraint that has been claimed to be constitutive of Victorian objectivity (Daston and Galison). Yet, while some Victorian thinkers certainly subscribed to the ideal of a dispassionate spectator “dying to know” (Levine), many of them were well aware that, in reality, the life of the observer and the matter to be observed were thoroughly entwined. As the chapter shows, this awareness of a deep-seated entanglement of the investigator and the investigated resulted not only in a concern with the ways and means of drawing the personal out of the general (or vice versa), so as to separate the scientific from all that which was not supposed to be part of it. More importantly, the Victorian belief in an intimate connection between being and knowing meant that natural historians such as Huxley attended closely to an experimental field in which the making of science overlaps with questions of sensory perception and aesthetic form.
Lena Wånggren
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474416269
- eISBN:
- 9781474434645
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416269.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the ...
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This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine.
This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.Less
This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine.
This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.
