Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Duncan, Ian
• Anderson, Amanda
• Shaw, Harry E

Titel

George Eliot and the Science of the Human

Ist Teil von

• A Companion to George Eliot, 2013, p.471-485

Ort / Verlag

Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley-Blackwell Online Books - All Titles (includes Withdrawn titles)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The science of man would also provide a new, secure foundation for that modern, post‐metaphysical literary form, the novel. The diminished condition of human life in the present is measured by an accelerated temporal economy. As human history came under the aegis of natural history, the Enlightenment figure of “man” was subsumed into the grander category of “life.” The Victorian social and natural sciences recalibrated life beyond the once absolute standards of the individual human body and lifespan, outwards and inwards, to scales both macroscopic and microscopic. This chapter glimpses the classic formula of the nineteenth‐century Bildungsroman, in which characters must escape from rural stagnation to enter the accelerated time of modernity‐the time of the city, of human history as change rather than continuity, of individual experience as growth and choice.