The Presence of Persons: Essays on Literature, Science and Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Myers,William

• ISBN13: 9781840146455
• ISBN10: 1840146451
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-11-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book deals with important aspects of nineteenth-century culture, literary, philosophical and scientific, which remain live issues today.It examines in detail the writings of Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, James Hamilton, Eliot Mill, Arnold, Pater and Newman and makes substantial reference to Hawthorne, Dickinson, Spencer, Carlyle and Hardy, all in the context of the dominant intellectual movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The thought of Hamilton, Newman, Mill and Spencer is contrasted with that of twentieth-century figures like the philosophers Frege, Husserl, Wittenstein, Merleau-Ponty, the neo-Darwinists Monod and Dawkins and critics like Eagleton and Miller.William Myers argues for a traditional view, deriving largely from Newman, of the unity and autonomy of individual human beings. He suggests that science and literature depend on persons being actively and responsively present to each other, that freedom is always interpersonal, and that in great literature we can discover the workings of this deep mutuality and its enemies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Nothing New	1	(20)
Part One The Presence of Persons
Where are Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson and Daniel C. Dennett?	21	(15)
Evolution and Progress: Herbert Spencer, Thomas Hardy and Amartya Sen	36	(13)
Why John Stuart Mill chose to go to the Devil	49	(14)
Walter Pater and the Higher Decadence	63	(7)
Arnold and Newman: The Phenomenological Option	70	(13)
Autobiography and the Illative Sense	83	(16)
Part Two Manifold and Complex Corruption
Celibate Men and Angelic Women in Oliver Twist	99	(10)
The Radicalism of Little Dorrit	109	(24)
Part Three Luminously Self-Evident Beings
The Feral Children of Haworth: Charlotte and Emily Bronte	133	(22)
Fragments of Consciousness: The Poems of Emily Bronte	155	(22)
The Rights of Celibacy	177	(20)
Part Four The Management of our Hearts
The Two Eternities: Race and Soul in Daniel Deronda	197	(10)
Justice and Freedom: The Portrait of a Lady	207	(17)
Notes	224	(13)
Index	237