Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draw...

“Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in par...

Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore th...

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art is a clear and compact survey of philosophical theories of the nature and value of art, including in its scope literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, movies, conceptual art and performance art. This second edition incorporates significant new research on topics including pictorial depiction, musical expression, conceptual art, Hegel, and art and society. Drawing on classical and contemporary philosophy, literary theory and art ...

What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? What featuers turn a discourse into a narrative text? Now widely acknowledged as one of the most significant volumes in its field, Narrative Fiction turns its attention to these and other questions.In contrast to many other studies, Narrative Fiction is organized arround issues - such as events, time, focalization, characterization, narration, the text and its reading...

Winner, 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismEverywhere today, we are urged to “connect.” Literary critics celebrate a new “honesty” in contemporary fiction or call for a return to “realism.” Yet such rhetoric is strikingly reminiscent of earlier theorizations. Two of the most famous injunctions of twentieth-century writing—E. M. Forster’s “Only connect . . .” and Fredric Jameson’s “Always historicize!”—helped establish connection as the purpose of ...

Suicide Century investigates suicide as a prominent theme in twentieth-century and contemporary literature. Andrew Bennett argues that with the waning of religious and legal prohibitions on suicide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the increasing influence of medical and sociological accounts of its causes and significance in the twentieth century, literature responds to the act and idea as an increasingly normalised but incessantly baffling phenomenon. Discussing works by a n...

This collection of essays provides students of literary critical theory with an introduction to Freudian methods of interpretation, and shows how those methods have been transformed by recent developments in French psychoanalysis, particularly by the influence of Jacques Lacan. It explains how classical Freudian criticism tended to focus on the thematic content of the literary text, whereas Lacanian criticism focuses on its linguistic structure, redirecting the reader to the words themselv...

Wittgenstein criticised prevailing attitudes toward the sciences. The target of his criticisms was ‘scientism’: what he described as ‘the overestimation of science’. This collection is the first study of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism - a theme in his work that is clearly central to his thought yet strikingly neglected by the existing literature.The book explores the philosophical basis of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism; how this anti-scientism helps us understand Wittgenstein’s phil...

The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description—what Virginia Woolf called "that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool." As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust.Description is the no...

Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer-William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces that defined the culture of modernism. The outstanding feature of this volume lies in its intent to investigate James's influence on both American and International Modernism. It provides, on the one hand, a multifaceted introduction to students of history, philosophy, and culture, and on the other, a compendium of some of the most...

The complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveal not only achievements but also exclusions. Misfit Forms offers a speculative reconstruction of roads less traveled. What if typographical emphasis and its associated transmission of sensuality and feeling had not lost out to “transparent” typography and its paradigms of sympathetic identification? What was truncated when cumulative narrative structures were declared primitive in relation to the unified t...