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
Heather Laura Brink-Roby
Hollander, Rachel
Badolato, Elizabeth
Price, Leah
Murphy, Patricia
Concepts
Science and literature
Psychology
Evolutionary psychology
Evolution
Astronomy
Science and gender
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
Places
Great Britain
Ireland
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