IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001567362

Embodying Agency: The Liberal Will, the Psychophysiological Individual, and Intersubjective Connections in the Victorian Novel (2012)

Blake, Kathleen
LaPorte, Charles
Woodward, Kathleen
University of Washington
Brown, Marshall
LaPorte, Charles
Woodward, Kathleen
Brown, Marshall
Publication date: 2012
Language: English

ISBN: 9781267915825

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Advisor: Blake, Kathleen; Committee Members: Brown, Marshall, LaPorte, Charles, Woodward, Kathleen.
Physical Details: 227 pp.

Outside Links

Mind and body Subjectivity Scientific literature Psychology Liberalism 19th century Great Britain Dickens, Charles Collins, Wilkie Brontë, Charlotte Eliot, George

My dissertation examines the emergence of a new language for agency in nineteenth-century literature and science, which articulated a form of intersubjectivity that departed from a central element of Victorian liberal ideology: the emphasis on the autonomous will as key to the advancement of civilization. I show that writers like Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins understand character development as importantly physiological, reflecting a movement in Victorian psychology that, for the first time, proposed a scientific account of the relationship between body and mind. The novels I take up do not necessarily affirm the kind of isolated, distanced individual that is typically associated with Victorian liberalism and the form of the novel. Instead, the relationship between body and agency is often imagined as a play of affective influence, constituting the theorization of an embodied intersubjective agency able to form and transform character through connections between bodies. As I show, this deviates from hallowed liberal ideals such as self-formation, the linear development of individual and society, the idea of evolutionary progress, and the role of a rational intellect in producing moral behavior.

...More

Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/06(E), Dec 2013. Proquest Document ID: 1313216774.

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001567362

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Thesis Malane, Rachel Ann; (2004)
“Sex in Mind”: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562029/)

Thesis Strovas, Karen Beth; (2011)
Sleep and Sleeplessness in the Victorian Novel, Jane Eyre to Dracula (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567273/)

Thesis Coriale, Danielle; (2009)
The Naturalist Imagination: Novel Forms of British Natural History, 1830--1890 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001560991/)

Book Buckland, Adelene; (2013)
Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320420/)

Thesis Heather Laura Brink-Roby; (2015)
Typical People in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (/p/isis/citation/CBB154143219/)

Thesis Menke, Richard Bruce; (2000)
Victorian interiors: The embodiment of subjectivity in English fiction, 1836--1901 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562669/)

Thesis Babcox, Emilie D.; (1998)
Health, illness, and medical theory in the novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë (/p/isis/citation/CBB001566147/)

Article Vrettos, Athena; (1990)
From neurosis to narrative: The private life of the nerves in Villette and Daniel Deronda (/p/isis/citation/CBB000041713/)

Chapter Perletti, Greta; (2010)
“As from a Dark and Troubled Sea”. The Light of Memory in Charlotte Brontë's Mature Fiction (/p/isis/citation/CBB001024888/)

Chapter Zwierlein, Anne-Julia; (2005)
From Parasitology to Parapsychology: Parasites in Nineteenth-Century Science and Literature (/p/isis/citation/CBB000772464/)

Thesis Elizabeth Badolato; (2018)
Identity and Morality in a Finite-Infinite World: Redefining Infinity in Nineteenth Century Novels (/p/isis/citation/CBB912416245/)

Thesis Picker, John Martin; (2001)
Hearing things: Sound in the Victorian imagination, 1848-1900 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001560933/)

Article Cameron, Lauren; (2013)
Interiors and Interiorities: Architectural Understandings of the Mind in Hard Times (/p/isis/citation/CBB001200839/)

Article Perletti, Greta; (2010)
Dickens, Victorian Mental Sciences and Mnemonic Errancy (/p/isis/citation/CBB001022459/)

Article Stolte, Tyson; (2014)
“And Graves Give up Their Dead”: The Old Curiosity Shop, Victorian Psychology, and the Nature of the Future Life (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201805/)

Book Cozzi, Annette; (2010)
The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201391/)

Article Cameron, Lauren; (2015)
Spencerian Evolutionary Psychology in Daniel Deronda (/p/isis/citation/CBB001550453/)

Book Rylance, Rick; (2000)
Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000102109/)

Article Ana Luiza de França Sá; Victor Lino Bernardes; (2021)
Expelled from Eden: How human beings turned planet Earth into a hostile place (/p/isis/citation/CBB042768138/)

Chapter Banfield, Marie; (2011)
Metaphors and Analogies of Mind and Body in Nineteenth-Century Science and Fiction: George Eliot, Henry James and George Meredith (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201380/)