Shows how the scientific question, 'Are we automata?', was addressed in late nineteenth-century literature and the arts.

The late nineteenth century saw a re-examination of artistic creativity in response to questions surrounding the relation between human beings and automata. These questions arose from findings in the 'new psychology', physiological research that diminished the primacy of mind and viewed human action as neurological and systemic. Concentrating on British and continental culture from 1870 to 1911, this unique study explores ways in which the idea of automatism helped shape ballet, art photography, literature, and professional writing. Drawing on documents including novels and travel essays, Linda M. Austin finds a link between efforts to establish standards of artistic practice and challenges to the idea of human exceptionalism. Austin presents each artistic discipline as an example of the same process: creation that should be intended, but involving actions that evade mental control. This study considers how late nineteenth-century literature and arts tackled the scientific question, 'Are we automata?'

Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind positions Charles Dickens's fiction in the midst of Victorian psychological debate, tracking Dickens's increasing reliance over the course of his career on the introspective mode, those moments--from free indirect discourse to first-person narration--in which Dickens attempts to represent the inner view of his characters' minds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, introspection remained the central investigative method for dualist psychologies, theories that tied the mind's immortality to its immateriality. Because those psychologies found evidence of the mind's ontological difference from the body in the subjective experience of consciousness, this book argues that the moments of inwardness in Dickens's fiction, in both their form and their content, constitute efforts to resist the encroachment of psycho-physiology by making a case for the mind's transcendence of the body. Yet Dickens and Victorian Psychology also shows the consequences of a material psychology's appropriation of such an inward view--as well as the results of the efforts by psycho-physiologists to redefine the terminology of a mainstream dualism--by tracing the ambiguities and contradictions that find their way into Dickens's representations of the mind. In these ways, this book reveals an overlooked context for Dickens's experiments with narrative point of view and broadens our understanding of the strategies that a material psychology used to assuage the anxieties of those who saw psycho-physiology as a threat to immortality.

Speaking to today's fascinations and anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence, this multidisciplinary collection is the first to examine the widespread Victorian interest in human and mechanical automata. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This interdisciplinary study examines how holistic aftercare became a crucial supplement to scientific medicine in nineteenth-century Britain.

Lauren Gillingham reveals how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel in nineteenth-century Britain.

Centring on Darwin and on literature throughout the nineteenth century, this book documents a general crisis in the species concept.