Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science

by George Levine

• ISBN13: 9780521885263
• ISBN10: 0521885264
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays extends and develops the key themes of his work: the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature, culture and science and the relation of knowledge and truth to ethics. The essays offer new perspectives on George Eliot, Thackeray, the Positivists, and the Scientific Naturalists, and reassess the complex relationship between Ruskin and Darwin. In readings of Lawrence and Coetzee, Levine addresses Victorian and modern efforts to push beyond the limits of realist art by testing its aesthetic and epistemological limits in engagement with the self and the other. Some of Levine's most important contributions to the field are reprinted, in revised and updated form, alongside previously unpublished material. Together, these essays cohere into an exploration both of Victorian literature and culture and of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic problems fundamental to our own times.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vi
Introduction	p. 1
The Subject Broached: Otherness, Epistemology, and Ethics
George Eliot's hypothesis of reality	p. 25
Ethics without God, or, Can "is" Become "Ought"?
Is life worth living?	p. 53
Ruskin and Darwin and the matter of matter	p. 75
Scientific discourse as an alternative to faith	p. 100
In defense of Positivism	p. 136
Why science isn't literature: the importance of differences	p. 165
Literature, Secularity, and the Quest for Otherness
Realism	p. 185
Dickens, secularism, and agency	p. 210
The heartbeat of the squirrel	p. 245
Real toads in imaginary gardens, or vice versa	p. 261
Epilogue	p. 270
Index	p. 275
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