Description: Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.
Brief description:
Benjamin Morgan is associate professor and chair of English language and literature at the University of Chicago, where he is also a member of the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization. He is the author of The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature.
Review Quotes: "The Outward Mind is most remarkable for its staggering scope. Morgan draws together the history of Kantian aesthetics, Linnaean concepts of artistic response, early natural theology, Victorian narrative history and art criticism, and twentieth-century literary formalism into a tightly woven narrative that tells the story of how humans understand their relations to art. Morgan clearly and cogently illuminates a dizzying web of networks between writers, artists, natural theologians and physiologists - a feat that will arouse the interest of both literary scholars and historians of science. Most exciting is the book's unexpected but nonetheless convincing pairings of figures like Walter Pater, William Morris, Thomas Hardy and Vernon Lee with scientists like Grant Allen, James Sully, Alexander Bain and Edmund Gurney."-- "The British Journal for the History of Science"