Description

Questions of survival were much discussed during the nineteenth-century, ranging from debates over the likelihood of a personal immortality, to anxieties over the more dispersed and unpredictable aftermath of particular acts and utterances. Some of these questions emerged in the intellectual and stylistic preoccupations of individual writers, such as Dickens, Tennyson, and FitzGerald. Others contributed towards the cultural atmosphere they shared, in which shifty and overlapping ideas of 'influence' (from the seductive touch of the mesmerist to the contagious breath of the poor) became central to attempts to work out how far-reaching were the effects which people had on one another and themselves.

Victorian Afterlives sets out to recover this atmosphere, and to explain why its pressures are still being exercised on and in our own ways of thinking. Moving freely between different fields of enquiry (including literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science), and written in a lively and accessible style, this major new study redraws the map of nineteenth-century culture to show what the Victorians made of one another, and what they might still help us make of ourselves.

Features

• 'Influence', that obsession of the Victorian mind, embraced all manner of after-effects from literary fame to life after death, mesmerism to miasma, all explored in this lively and subtle study.
• Ranges across disciplines, to capture the cultural atmosphere shared by writers and poets, scientists and sanitation reformers, theologians and philosophers.

Reviews

"Ambitious, delightful.... Its sheer range sets it apart from the usual academic monograph.... Refreshingly free of jargon."--Times Literary Supplement

"An intriguing study--ambitious in its scope and sceptical in its approach.... The book's openness to a large number of areas of interest and discourse is what makes it so interesting and so original."--Essays in Criticism

Product Details

384 pages; 2 line illus.; ISBN13: 978-0-19-926931-0ISBN10: 0-19-926931-9

About the Author(s)