In this Book

buy this book Buy This Book in Print
summary
For twenty-first-century veterans of the evolution culture wars, Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel, by Anna Neill, makes unlikely bedfellows of two Victorian “discoveries”: evolutionary theory and spiritualism. Victorian science did much to uncover the physical substratum of mystical or dreamy experience, tracing spiritual states to a lower, reflex, or more evolutionarily primitive stage of consciousness. Yet science’s pursuit of knowledge beyond sense-based evidence uncannily evoked powers associated with this primitive mind: the capacity to link events across space and time, to anticipate the future, to uncover elements of the forgotten past, and to see into the minds of others. Neill does not ask how the Victorians explained away spiritual experience through physiological psychology, but instead explores how physical explanation interacted with dreamy content in Victorian accounts of the mind’s most exotic productions. This synthesis, she argues, was particularly acute in realist fiction, where, despite novelists’ willingness to trace the nervous origins of individual behavior and its social consequences, activity in hidden regions of the mind enabled levels of perception inaccessible to ordinary waking thought. The authors in her study include Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hardy.

Table of Contents

Download PDF Download Full Book
  1. Cover
  2. p. 1
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Title Page, Copyright Page
  2. pp. 2-5
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Table of Contents
  2. pp. vii-viii
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. ix-x
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Introduction: Evolution and the Dreamy Mind
  2. pp. 1-32
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 1. Charlotte Bronte's Hypochondriacal Heroines
  2. pp. 33-63
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 2. Spirits and Seizures in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend
  2. pp. 64-90
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 3. Suspended Animation and Second Sight: Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner
  2. pp. 91-121
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 4. Dreamy Intuition and Detective Genius: Ezra Jennings and Sherlock Holmes
  2. pp. 122-151
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 5. The End of the Novel: Naturalism and Reverie in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Return of the Native
  2. pp. 152-180
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Conclusion
  2. pp. 181-183
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 185-212
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Works Cited
  2. pp. 213-228
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Index
  2. pp. 229-246
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Back Cover
  2. p. 255
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
Back To Top