Environmental Desire in: The Mill on the Floss

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-222
Author(s):  
Jayne Hildebrand
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Biological Medium ◽  
Ecological Role ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Biological Concept ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Relationship Of

Jayne Hildebrand, “Environmental Desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss” (pp. 192–222) This essay argues that George Eliot’s expansive use of landscape description in The Mill on the Floss (1860) represents an engagement with the emerging concept of a biological “medium” or “environment” in the nineteenth-century sciences. In the 1850s, scientific writers including Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes redefined biological life as dependent on an abstraction called a “medium” or “environment”—a term that united all the objects, substances, and forces in an organism’s physical surroundings into a singular entity. Eliot in The Mill on the Floss draws out the ecological potential of this new biological concept by imbuing the described backgrounds of her novel with a lyrical affect I call “environmental desire,” a diffuse longing for ambient contact with one’s formative medium that offers an ethical alternative to the possessive and object-driven forms of desire that drive the plot of a traditional Bildungsroman. Maggie Tulliver’s marriage plot is structured by a tension between environmental desire and possessive desire, in which her erotic desire for Stephen Guest competes with a more diffuse environmental desire that attaches to the novel’s described backgrounds. Ultimately, the new environment concept enables Eliot to reconceive the Bildungsroman’s usual opposition between self and world as a relationship of nourishment and dependency rather than struggle, and invites a reconsideration of the ecological role of description in the Bildungsroman genre.

The Long Peace of the Nineteenth Century and the Birth of Sociology

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Research Programs ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Liberal Thought

This chapter examines how the progressive optimism nourished by liberal doctrines gradually began to take hold and how sociology as a discipline took a particularly wide variety of institutional forms and featured very different theoretical and research programs. Toward the end of the eighteenth and during the first third of the nineteenth centuries, utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and later James and John Stuart Mill were already singing the praises of free trade and its peace-promoting effects. This laid the foundations for at least one strand of liberal thought in the nineteenth century, on which early “sociologists” such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer could then build. Despite the hegemonic status of liberal doctrines, other views were always present beneath the surface. This includes Marxism, which in many respects embraced the legacy of liberalism.

Herbert Spencer and the Spectre of Comte

1967 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney Eisen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
To Come ◽  
Century Science ◽  
George Sarton

“It is very interesting to compare Spencer and Comte,” wrote George Sarton in an essay lauding their efforts to embrace all knowledge in a grand synthesis. The comparison, indeed, was tempting for contemporaries, as it has been for students of ideas. Both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were authors of new philosophic systems which, they believed, had been built on the firm foundations of science, and both were convinced that society should be reconstructed in accordance with the truths of their philosophies. The insistence of Positivists and some who were not Positivists that Spencer, consciously or not, had been influenced by Comte, and Spencer's repeated and fervent denials, made for a series of controversies that extended over half a century and ranged from the minutiae of priority to the more important issues of the classification of the sciences and the nature of religion.The eclipse of both the Positive Philosophy of Comte and the Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer in the twentieth century hardly suggests the interest they aroused in the nineteenth. The unification of knowledge and the discovery of the laws of man and society were dreams which nineteenth-century science and philosophy hoped to realize. Comte and Spencer made their contribution in this area; and while both were attacked for erecting systems on questionable assumptions, and for their weakness in details, their extraordinary ability to amass quantities of information and to come up with penetrating generalizations attracted admirers and disciples. Few of their critics thought that what they had set out to do was not worth doing, or could not be done.

All That Is Solid Turns into Steam

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-373
Author(s):  
Deborah Shapple Spillman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The Novel ◽  
General Will ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Ludwig Feuerbach ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Comparative Structure ◽  
Affective Relations

Deborah Shapple Spillman, “All That Is Solid Turns into Steam: Sublimation and Sympathy in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss” (pp. 338–373) This essay argues that steam and its gaseous properties in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1861) represent capital’s increasing abstraction in the nineteenth century that threatened to disrupt economic and affective relations between people, property, and places associated with the past while nevertheless introducing new modes of circulation and more diffusive opportunities for sympathetic connection. The novel’s return to an earlier stage in the development of capital places the 1830s of the story in dialogue with the 1860s of its narration, while inviting readers to compare the values of this earlier period to those of their own. Considering this comparative structure in relation to nineteenth-century ethnography and its interlocutors—including Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx—I read Edward Tulliver’s primitive materialism and the Dodson sisters’ fetishism as both humorous reactions and more earnest forms of resistance to this increasing abstraction. Eliot ultimately turns toward the figurative possibilities of sublimation as a way to bridge the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the general, will and affect, self and other. Sublimation—not liquidation—therefore serves as the more apt metaphor for sympathy in the novel.

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY IN VICTORIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT: T. H. GREEN, HERBERT SPENCER, AND HENRY SIDGWICK

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
DUNCAN BELL ◽  
CASPER SYLVEST
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
Liberal Ideology ◽  
Fundamental Distinction

In the second half of the nineteenth century, British liberal ideology contained an open-ended vision of international order. The vision usually included a notion of an incipient or immanent international society composed of civilized nations. The fundamental distinction between civilized and barbarian nations meant that while this perceived society was international, in no sense was it global. In this essay we outline some of the broader characteristics of the internationalist outlook that many liberals shared and specifically discuss the claims about international society that they articulated. Liberal internationalism was a broad church and many (but not all) of its fundamental assumptions about the nature and direction of international progress and the importance of civilization were shared by large swathes of the intellectual elite. These assumptions are analysed by exploring the conceptions of international society found in three of the most influential thinkers of the time, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick. Finally, the essay turns to the limitations of this vision of international society, especially in the context of the role of empire.

scholarly journals The Piano Plague: The Nineteenth-Century Medical Critique of Female Musical Education

Gesnerus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
James Kennaway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music Therapy ◽  
Reproductive Organs ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Cult Of Domesticity ◽  
Rival Models ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The role of music in nineteenth-century female education has been seen primarily in the context of the middle class cult of domesticity, and the relationship of music to medicine in the period has generally been viewed in terms of music therapy. Nevertheless, for much of the century t here was serious medical discussion a bout the dangers of excessive music in girls’ education. Many of the leading psychiatrists and gynaecologists of the nineteenth century argued that music could over-stimulate the nervous system, playing havoc with vulnerable female nerves and reproductive organs, and warned of the consequences of music lessons on the developing bodies of teenage girls. Two rival models of music’s effects competed and were combined. One suggested that music led to illness by provoking sensuality, imagination and sexuality; the other argued that it was a source of neurasthenic fatigue because of intellectual strain.

scholarly journals O negro enquanto sujeito na História da Educação: as contribuições de uma nova abordagem historiográfica e uma perspectiva de análise para o estado-nação imperial / The black as a subject in the Hstory of Education: the contributions of a new historiographic approach and an analysis perspective for the state-imperial nation

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Priscilla Verona
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of

A historiografia educacional brasileira, sobretudo no que tange aos estudos referentes ao século XIX, caracterizou frequentemente o negro como um escravo, que, destituído de direitos, estabelecia uma relação de exclusão com a sociedade e com os processos educativos. Ao não ser considerado um sujeito social pela historiografia tradicional, o negro se manteve durante longo período de tempo à margem também de nossa historiografia da educação. No entanto, nas últimas décadas vem se consubstanciando um movimento rico de superação do silencionamento que foi produzido em relação aos negros na história da educação. Abordagens mais problematizantes aliadas ao surgimento de inúmeras pesquisas e iniciativas passaram a privilegiar e considerar o papel ativo do negro dentro da história da educação no Brasil. Nesse sentido, o artigo se propõe a realizar um breve balanço, buscando sobretudo trazer perspectivas para se pensar o Estado - Nação imperial por meio de uma série de contribuições que dão visibilidade ao protagonismo negro na história.***Brazilian educational historiography, especially with regard to studies relates to the nineteenth century, often characterized  the black as a slave, who deprived of rights, established a relationship of exclusion with society and educational processes. Not being considered a social subject by traditional historiography, the  black remained for a long period of time also on the fringes of our historiography of education. However, in recent decades there has been a rich movement to overcome the silencing that has been produced in relation to blacks in the history of education. More problematic approaches coupled with the emergence of numerous researches and initiatives began to privilege and consider the active role of blacks within the history of education in Brasil. In this sense, the article proposes to make a brief balance, seeking above all to bring perspectives to think the imperial Nation State.  

scholarly journals Building in mid-nineteenth Century Halifax

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Buggey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Scale Construction ◽  
General Relationship ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Insight Into

An important element in the construction of the nineteenth century cityscape was the "master builder," who in Halifax emerged in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and who significantly changed the role of builders from, primarily, artisans in particular trades to contractors with capacity to meet the needs of large scale construction. They were men who undertook building on a scale sufficient to employ a continuous workforce and who usually carried out all aspects of a contract. One such man was George Lang, a Scottish mason, who in the period 1858 to 1865 contracted for construction of a number of major buildings in growing Halifax. The study of one such "master builder" provides some insight into the study of the cityscape, though much work remains on the inter-relationship of builder, artisan, and architect, as well as the role of legislation, the nature and supply of material, the economics of the building process and the general relationship of buildings to the urban environment.

Conclusion

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
New Words ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Victorian Science

This chapter uses the historical account of Victorian science, religion, and ethics as the basis for some brief reflections on philosophical problems and political pitfalls that are in some cases still associated with concepts of altruism. It was a sense of intellectual confinement that led nineteenth-century theorists such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer to invent new words with which to construct new scientific visions of humanity and society. Terms such as ‘sociology’ and ‘altruism’ made those new visions possible. People have now inherited the categories that they created, and those categories can themselves be confining rather than liberating. By providing accounts of the contingent circumstances in which they were created, the intellectual historian can draw attention to the provisional nature of our categories and can thus help to undermine the sense that they are inevitable, or even natural.

У пошуках гармонії: Vals mèlancolque в контексті малої прози О. Кобилянської кінця ХІХ ст.

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Olga Yablonska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Substantial Role ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This paper analizes O. Kobylanska’s story “Vals mèlancolque” as the epicenter of the writers’ refl ections on the category of harmony and happiness. The relationship of O. Kobylanska’s spiritual quest in «Diary» and short prose of the late nineteenth century is observed (“Nature”, “Rose”, “Ignorant”, “Vals mèlancolque”, “Humility”, etc.). The author’s vision of the substantial role of art and words in the story “Vals mèlancolque” is highligted. This paper also investigates the symbolist nature of a text. The writer emphasizes the understanding of the actual idea of women’s emancipation. The paper shows that female characters embody the author’s conscious distinction of such categories as “love” (Martha), “cold art” (Anna) and a harmonious combination of “pieces” and “love” (Sofi a). It is concluded that in the work of Kobylanska the text is a landmark, being both a kind of life and artistic credo.

Interior Decoration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gossling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the role of interior decoration in decadent culture by examining the relationship of decadent lives to decadent writing. The interiors described in decadent fiction often take inspiration from real houses and apartments; those fictional descriptions, in turn, sometimes inspire the decoration of actual homes. The article begins with a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Furniture,” and then considers the “museum houses” of the Goncourt brothers and Robert de Montesquiou. These real spaces were the ne plus ultra of artistic living in the nineteenth century and influenced the decoration of the interiors in J.-K. Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884). The final section considers the legacy of decadent design in interior decoration by examining Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale degli Italiani (Shrine of Italian victories), the hillside estate where the writer lived from 1922 until his death in 1938, and the “dictator chic” aesthetic evident in the design choices of Donald Trump and his rich, famous, and authoritarian contemporaries.

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