Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.
Victorian Empiricism
Peter Garratt
€ 125.82
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for Victorian Empiricism
Hardback. Num Pages: 244 pages. BIC Classification: 1DBK; DSB; HPK. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 152 x 236 x 20. Weight in Grams: 499.
Empiricism, one of Raymond Williams's keywords, circulates in much contemporary thought and criticism solely as a term of censure, a synonym for spurious objectivity or positivism. Yet rarely, if ever, has it had this philosophical implication. Dr. Johnson, it should be recalled, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of common sense. In an effort to restore historical depth to this term, this book examines epistemology in the narrative prose of five writers, John Rushkin, Alexander Bain, G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and George Eliot, developing the view that the flourishing of nineteenth-century scientific culture occured at a time when empiricism itself was critically dismantling any such naive representationalism.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2010
Publisher
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press United States
Number of pages
244
Condition
New
Number of Pages
244
Place of Publication
Cranbury, United States
ISBN
9781611474909
SKU
V9781611474909
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Peter Garratt
Peter Garratt is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. He holds degrees from Durham University and the University of Edinburgh, and has published several articles on Victorian literature and culture exploring interactions between literary form and intellectual history. Victorian Empiricism is his first book.
Reviews for Victorian Empiricism
This is...an outstanding and thoroughgoing work of intellectual recuperation, and one which corrects many prevailing assumptions. In sum, Victorian Empiricism is a study which will be of interest to all concerned with the complex map of Victorian thought.
Metascience
In Victorian Empiricism, Peter Garratt surveys mid-Victorian literature for moments when writers engage with psychologists in order to ask 'what it means to know, and to strive for knowledge from an always-limited consciousness, and to be situated yet aspire to see more reality than one perspective allows, and to experience the not knowing' (21). ... Garratt weaves readings of exemplary moments in Middlemarch into his discussion of Victorian psychologists in a way that disperses questions of influence within an attractive contextual tissue that is nonetheless strangely impervious to questions about specific ways and means. . . . Garratt is attentive to the Spinoza-esque elements of Eliot's fiction as well as similar moments in the psychological writers that form the core of his study.
The Victorian Web
Metascience
In Victorian Empiricism, Peter Garratt surveys mid-Victorian literature for moments when writers engage with psychologists in order to ask 'what it means to know, and to strive for knowledge from an always-limited consciousness, and to be situated yet aspire to see more reality than one perspective allows, and to experience the not knowing' (21). ... Garratt weaves readings of exemplary moments in Middlemarch into his discussion of Victorian psychologists in a way that disperses questions of influence within an attractive contextual tissue that is nonetheless strangely impervious to questions about specific ways and means. . . . Garratt is attentive to the Spinoza-esque elements of Eliot's fiction as well as similar moments in the psychological writers that form the core of his study.
The Victorian Web