Article ID: CBB840458699

Thomas Hardy and the Value of Brains (2020)

unapi

This article reads Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as ambivalent responses to the new conception of human intelligence that emerged from Victorian psychology and evolutionary theory and which formed the basis of what I describe as the Victorian biopolitics of intelligence. Although these novels reflect Hardy's endorsement of the new biological model of intelligence, they also register his resistance to what many late Victorians assumed to be its corollary: that mental worth can be an object of scientific measurement, classification, and ranking. I suggest that the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière illuminates the extent to which these novels challenge the scientific reification of intellectual inequality and attempt to vindicate overlooked and stigmatized forms of intelligence.

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Authors & Contributors
Henchman, Anna Alexandra
Buckland, Adelene
Cameron, Lauren
Coccaro, Adam
Fisher, Philip
Frederickson, Kathleen
Journals
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Biology and Philosophy
Modernism/Modernity
Victorian Literature and Culture
Victorian Studies
Publishers
Harvard University
Ashgate
University of Chicago
University of Toronto
New York University
Oxford University Press
Concepts
Science and literature
Psychology
Astronomy
Evolution
Evolutionary psychology
Darwinism
People
Hardy, Thomas
Eliot, George
Collins, Wilkie
Dickens, Charles
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord
Blind, Mathilde
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
Places
Great Britain
Ireland
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