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  • Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century by Anne Stiles
  • Elisha Cohn (bio)
Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century, by Anne Stiles; pp. xi + 255. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, £57.00, $94.00.

In the introduction to her rich, informative Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century, Anne Stiles quotes a provocative assessment by William James: “Nature is everywhere gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other, and untidy” (13). As Stiles demonstrates, the science of mind at the fin de siècle prompted substantial debate that turned to aesthetic categories in order to resist biological reductionism. As nineteenth-century physiologists built on phrenology to establish the localization of brain functions, they increasingly suggested that an objective view of the brain would prove the biological determination of human thought and action. This book follows James’s tantalizing suggestion that a gothic style might better capture an accurate conception of biology, demonstrating how popular scientific romances—by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Grant Allen, H. G. Wells, and Marie Corelli—tested the idea that mental life is physiologically determined.

Popular Fiction and Brain Science offers an important counter to the tendency of Victorianists to privilege realism when considering the relationship of literature to the sciences. Scholars concerned primarily with realism (originally, George Levine and Gillian Beer) have understood literature to collaborate with the forms of knowledge production in the sciences. For Stiles, the scientific intrigue of popular novels was a means of asserting the unruly, immediate, sensuous, and baroque aspects of mental life not accommodated by the sciences. As a genre which emphasizes divided selfhood and non-recognition, the gothic reemerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a particularly effective medium for animating the unfamiliar forms of selfhood science had theorized. Stiles makes a strong case that novelists writing in the romance and gothic genres reveal “conflicted” views of science and engaged in “complicitous critique” of scientific discourses (22). Popular fiction at times “lays bare the limitations of scientific prose,” but also uses neurological concepts in two ways: by suggesting that individuals may not be self-controlled, and by appealing to readers’ physiological responses (30).

Drawing on a broad range of texts from personal correspondence to scientific case studies to journalism, Stiles shows the ways in which the popular novel engages the most technical and fine-grained distinctions in these emerging fields. While the readings of novels here may not upend previous interpretations, Stiles consistently showcases how the form of popular romances reflects their authors’ fascination with the contemporary sciences—and their profound sense of the agency of literature in making knowledge. Stiles also sketches gothic tropes that have endured beyond the Victorian period: the continued popularity of the vampire tale as a response to neurological determinism that preserves a discourse of the soul, and the figure of the mad scientist who reflects fears of the fate of morality in evolutionary change.

The first section, “Reactionaries,” contextualizes works that refuse the localization of the self in the brain and critique the discursive forms used in the scientific community. This section demonstrates that The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) responds to theories of dual personality circulating in the 1870s and looks backward to phrenology. Likewise, Stoker’s Dracula (1897) reflects his knowledge of radically determinist, controversial experiments in cerebral automatism by David Ferrier and Jean-Martin Charcot, as well as William Benjamin Carpenter’s theory of unconscious [End Page 531] cerebration first put forward in the 1850s; these accounts of automatism register in Dracula as the loss of free will which victims of vampirism experience. But this section also makes a case for the specific function of literary responses to brain science as a discursive practice. Suggesting the disastrous effects of imbalanced hemispheres, Stevenson also creates formal splits, using a detached, episodic structure to subvert the form of case studies in new, professional scientific journals. In chapter 2, Dracula is shown to use a similar formal choice. Stiles backs up Dracula’s clear defense of a science that accommodates spiritual...

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