Benjamin Morgan (Author)
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 draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.
...MoreReview Monique R. Morgan (2018) Review of "The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 646-647).
Review Shannon Draucker (2017) Review of "The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature". British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 734-735).
Thesis
Andrea Wald;
(2015)
Ornament. Eine österreichische Befindlichkeit
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Chapter
Suzanne Raitt;
(2017)
Immoral Science in The Picture of Dorian Gray
(/isis/citation/CBB207341935/)
Thesis
Bartlett, Mark;
(2005)
Chronotopology and the Scientific-Aesthetic in Philosophy, Literature and Art
(/isis/citation/CBB001561562/)
Chapter
Berg, Sara van den;
(2013)
Dwarf Aesthetics in Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Early Modern Court
(/isis/citation/CBB001201693/)
Book
Carrie Rohman;
(2018)
Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance
(/isis/citation/CBB562865624/)
Book
Anna K. Sagal;
(2021)
Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB259998433/)
Thesis
Matthew H. Vollgraff;
(2019)
The Science of Expression: Ausdruckskunde and Bodily Knowledge in German Modernist Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB832353783/)
Article
Stefan Forrester;
(2020)
Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Kant Problem’: metaphysics, science, and art
(/isis/citation/CBB068647714/)
Thesis
Kramer, Martin Oskar;
(2002)
Immaculate Skin, Admirable Machine: Body and Representation in French Aesthetics, Science, and Art, 1850--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001562198/)
Thesis
Newman, Winifred Elysse;
(2010)
Imaginative Beholding: Physiological Psychology and the Discourse on Representation in fin-de-siècle Germany
(/isis/citation/CBB001567225/)
Book
Michael Boulter;
(2018)
Bloomsbury Scientists: Science and Art in the Wake of Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB021619597/)
Book
Henning Schmidgen;
(2013)
Hirn und Zeit: Die Geschichte eines Experiments 1800-1950
(/isis/citation/CBB800419900/)
Article
Maddalena Napolitani;
(2018)
'Born with the Taste for Science and the Arts': The Science and the Aesthetics of Balthazar-Georges Sage's Mineralogy Collections, 1783–18251
(/isis/citation/CBB175466446/)
Book
Brain, Robert Michael;
(2015)
The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-De-Siècle Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB001551935/)
Article
Lanzoni, Susan;
(2009)
Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee's Aesthetics of Empathy
(/isis/citation/CBB000932855/)
Book
Kennaway, James Gordon;
(2014)
Music and the Nerves, 1700-1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001510075/)
Chapter
Prodger, Phillip;
(2009)
Ugly Disagreements: Darwin and Ruskin Discuss Sex and Beauty
(/isis/citation/CBB001035100/)
Book
Leslie, Esther;
(2005)
Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry
(/isis/citation/CBB000741799/)
Book
Finseth, Ian Frederick;
(2009)
Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770--1860
(/isis/citation/CBB001231161/)
Book
Paola Luciani;
(2019)
Letteratura e scienza: Studi su Francesco De Sanctis
(/isis/citation/CBB175181137/)
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