Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science write by David Sweeney Coombs. This book was released on 2019-11-19. Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."
Embodied
Embodied - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Embodied write by William A. Cohen. This book was released on 2009. Embodied available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "In these elegant engagements with literary works, cultural history, and critical theory, Cohen advances a phenomenological approach to embodiment, proposing that we encounter the world not through our minds or souls but through our senses."--BOOK JACKET.
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain write by Leah Price. This book was released on 2012-04-09. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.
The Physiology of the Novel
The Physiology of the Novel - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Physiology of the Novel write by Nicholas Dames. This book was released on 2007-09-27. The Physiology of the Novel available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. How did the Victorians read novels? Nicholas Dames answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading, He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine - as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, The Physiology of the Novel challenges our assumptions about what novel-reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.
Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists
Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists write by Srdjan Smajić. This book was released on 2010-04-29. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century - ghost stories and detective stories - and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we 'see' is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge.
