Description
Book SynopsisEmpiricism, one of Raymond Williams's keywords, circulates in much contemporary thought and criticism solely as a term of censure, a synonym for spurious objectivity or positivism. Yet rarely, if ever, has it had this philosophical implication. Dr. Johnson, it should be recalled, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of common sense. In an effort to restore historical depth to this term, this book examines epistemology in the narrative prose of five writers, John Rushkin, Alexander Bain, G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and George Eliot, developing the view that the flourishing of nineteenth-century scientific culture occured at a time when empiricism itself was critically dismantling any such naive representationalism.
Trade ReviewThis is...an outstanding and thoroughgoing work of intellectual recuperation, and one which corrects many prevailing assumptions. In sum, Victorian Empiricism is a study which will be of interest to all concerned with the complex map of Victorian thought. * Metascience *
In Victorian Empiricism, Peter Garratt surveys mid-Victorian literature for moments when writers engage with psychologists in order to ask 'what it means to know, and to strive for knowledge from an always-limited consciousness, and to be situated yet aspire to see more reality than one perspective allows, and to experience the not knowing' (21). ... Garratt weaves readings of exemplary moments in Middlemarch into his discussion of Victorian psychologists in a way that disperses questions of influence within an attractive contextual tissue that is nonetheless strangely impervious to questions about specific ways and means. . . . Garratt is attentive to the Spinoza-esque elements of Eliot's fiction as well as similar moments in the psychological writers that form the core of his study. * The Victorian Web *
