2013
DOI: 10.1017/cbo9781139566384
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Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel

Abstract: Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment. Revising the widespread assumption that Victorian science and literature were part of one culture, she argues that the professionalization of science prompted novelists to deny that science offered widely accessible moral benefits. Instead, they represent… Show more

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Cited by 79 publications
(7 citation statements)
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“…In not showing a scene of vivisection, Collins avoids oversensationalising his book, which would have detracted from his critique of medical science, according to critics Pedlar (2003, 169) and Straley (2010, 372). DeWitt (2013), describing ‘the role of gender in vivisection debates’ as ‘more complex than has hither to been recognized’ (128), goes further to say that not only did ‘vivisection degrade the moral character of its practitioners’, in the eyes Victorian antivivisectionist campaigns (127), but that vivisection as ‘science must be removed from the novel’ (129). Rather, Collins only uses the threat of vivisection to implicate Benjulia as a bad doctor and a practitioner of unethical medicine.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In not showing a scene of vivisection, Collins avoids oversensationalising his book, which would have detracted from his critique of medical science, according to critics Pedlar (2003, 169) and Straley (2010, 372). DeWitt (2013), describing ‘the role of gender in vivisection debates’ as ‘more complex than has hither to been recognized’ (128), goes further to say that not only did ‘vivisection degrade the moral character of its practitioners’, in the eyes Victorian antivivisectionist campaigns (127), but that vivisection as ‘science must be removed from the novel’ (129). Rather, Collins only uses the threat of vivisection to implicate Benjulia as a bad doctor and a practitioner of unethical medicine.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Victorian science, in this view, appears as an inflexible set of empirical truths that literary writers more or less passively absorbed. In DeWitt's words, the dominant reading practice in the field was thus to reveal the “hidden scientific significance of a non‐scientific element” by identifying the scientific influences secretly at play in a given piece of literature (6). Beer's and Levine's works, DeWitt adds, in some ways encouraged the assumption that most Victorian literary writers accepted, rather than challenged, these scientific influences (taking up this assumption, DeWitt's project complicates the one‐culture narrative by chronicling novelists' and scientists' efforts to differentiate their respective pursuits) (5).…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In DeWitt's words, the dominant reading practice in the field was thus to reveal the “hidden scientific significance of a non‐scientific element” by identifying the scientific influences secretly at play in a given piece of literature (6). Beer's and Levine's works, DeWitt adds, in some ways encouraged the assumption that most Victorian literary writers accepted, rather than challenged, these scientific influences (taking up this assumption, DeWitt's project complicates the one‐culture narrative by chronicling novelists' and scientists' efforts to differentiate their respective pursuits) (5). Nonetheless, the publication of Darwin's Plots inaugurated a series of inquiries that attempted to generate more systematic accounts of the formation of aestheticism at large and its correlation with the rise of evolutionary thinking.…”
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confidence: 99%
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