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  3. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel
  • Cited by 42
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139566384
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139566384
Subjects:
Literature, History of Ideas, English Literature 1830-1900, Politics and International Relations
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (84)
Information

Book description

Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment. Revising the widespread assumption that Victorian science and literature were part of one culture, she argues that the professionalization of science prompted novelists to deny that science offered widely accessible moral benefits. Instead, they represented the narrow aspirations of the professional as morally detrimental while they asserted that moral concerns were the novel's own domain of professional expertise. This book draws on works of natural theology, popular lectures, and debates from the pages of periodicals to delineate changes in the status of science and to show how both familiar and neglected works of Victorian fiction sought to redefine the relationship between science and the novel.

Reviews

'… a confident and provocative work that has an impressively large bibliography and ambitious scope.'

Amy M. King Source: Victorian Periodical Review

'… an interdisciplinary and ambitious study that delivers a collection of chapters covering such scientific topics as astronomy, medicine, scientific naturalism and vivisection. … Every chapter exhibits an array of fascinating primary evidence that demonstrates her own commitment to investigating the 'surface' as to the opposed hidden meaning of Victorian texts. … In doing so, the study presents a compelling, persuasive and confident study that offers sharp and intelligent readings of the nineteenth-century novel and its relationship to experimental science. … insightful and provocative. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel proposes an important assembly of questions and provides some robust and intriguing answers of its own.

Ann Loveridge Source: British Society for Literature and Science Reviews (www.bsls.ac.uk)

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