Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reprint, 7/26/2012
EAN 9780521349499, ISBN10: 0521349494
Paperback, 294 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays 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 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of Levine's most important contributions to the field are reprinted, in revised and updated form, alongside previously unpublished material.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.
1. Introduction
Part I. The Subject Broached
Otherness, Epistemology, and Ethics
1. George Eliot and the hypothesis of reality
Part II. Ethics Without God, or, Can 'Is' be 'Ought'
2. Is life worth living?
3. Ruskin and Darwin and the matter of matter
4. Scientific discourse as an alternative to faith
5. In defense of positivism
6. How science isn't literature
the importance of differences
Part III. Literature, Secularity, and the Quest for Otherness
7. Victorian realism
8. Dickens, secularism and agency
9. The heartbeat of the squirrel
10. Real toads in imaginary gardens, or vice versa.