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Realism and representation : essays on the problem of realism in relation to science, literature, and culture
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ISBN: 0299136345 0299136302 Year: 1993 Publisher: Madison (Wis.) : University of Wisconsin Press,


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Darwin the writer
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ISBN: 9780199608430 0199608431 0191731706 0191619345 Year: 2011 Publisher: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press,

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Darwin loves you : natural selection and the re-enchantment of the world
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ISBN: 1282298275 9786612298271 1400827337 9781400827336 9780691136394 0691136394 9781282298279 6612298278 Year: 2008 Publisher: Princeton, NJ ; Woodstock : Princeton University Press,

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Jesus and Darwin do battle on car bumpers across America. Medallions of fish symbolizing Jesus are answered by ones of amphibians stamped "Darwin," and stickers proclaiming "Jesus Loves You" are countered by "Darwin Loves You." The bumper sticker debate might be trivial and the pronouncement that "Darwin Loves You" may seem merely ironic, but George Levine insists that the message contains an unintended truth. In fact, he argues, we can read it straight. Darwin, Levine shows, saw a world from which his theory had banished transcendence as still lovable and enchanted, and we can see it like that too--if we look at his writings and life in a new way. Although Darwin could find sublimity even in ants or worms, the word "Darwinian" has largely been taken to signify a disenchanted world driven by chance and heartless competition. Countering the pervasive view that the facts of Darwin's world must lead to a disenchanting vision of it, Levine shows that Darwin's ideas and the language of his books offer an alternative form of enchantment, a world rich with meaning and value, and more wonderful and beautiful than ever before. Without minimizing or sentimentalizing the harsh qualities of life governed by natural selection, and without deifying Darwin, Levine makes a moving case for an enchanted secularism--a commitment to the value of the natural world and the human striving to understand it.

Dying to know
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ISBN: 1282904604 9786612904608 0226475387 9780226475387 0226475360 9780226475363 0226475379 Year: 2002 Publisher: Chicago University of Chicago Press

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"Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials, and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is remarkable. This elegant and evocative look at the move toward objectivity first pioneered by Descartes sheds new light on some old and still perplexing problems in modern science." Bernard Lightman, York University, Canada In Dying to Know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century? Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die. Dying to Know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge.


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Realism, ethics and secularism : essays on Victorian literature and science
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ISBN: 9780511484872 9780521885263 9780521349499 0511437900 9780511437908 9780511438578 0511438575 0521885264 1107200512 1281903825 9786611903824 0511484879 0511436459 0511435657 0511437234 0521349494 Year: 2008 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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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.


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Reading Thomas Hardy
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ISBN: 1316836053 1316823296 1316832481 1107177960 1316630803 Year: 2017 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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This major new reading of the novels of Thomas Hardy, by leading critic George Levine, disentangles the author's often elaborately distanced prose from his beautiful poetic and precise renderings of the natural world. Clear, direct and minimally academic in his own writing, Levine provides an overview of Hardy's entire fictional canon, with extensive discussions of his early and late novels including his last, The Well-Beloved. Levine draws new attention to the way Hardy absorbed both the ideas and the writing strategies of Charles Darwin, and develops new perspectives first articulated in the criticism of great novelists - in particular Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Levine departs from the critical norm by reading Hardy in the context of his deep feeling for the natural world and all living things, and the implicit affirmation of life that sometimes drives his bleakest narratives.


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The boundaries of fiction : Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman,
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Year: 1968 Publisher: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press,

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The emergence of Victorian consciousness : the spirit of the age,
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Year: 1967 Publisher: New York : Free Press,

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The Cambridge companion to George Eliot
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ISBN: 9780511999307 9780521662673 9780521664738 Year: 2001 Publisher: Cambridge Cambridge University Press

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Henry Fielding and the dry mock : a study of the techniques of irony in his early works
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Year: 1967 Publisher: The Hague Mouton

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