Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.1515/9780691194189-003
{"title":"Chapter Two. The Form of the Novel","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9780691194189-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691194189-003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":197549,"journal":{"name":"Human Forms","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125834989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.1515/9780691194189-002
{"title":"Introduction. The Human Age","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9780691194189-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691194189-002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":197549,"journal":{"name":"Human Forms","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128878239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-03DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691175072.003.0001
I. Duncan
This introductory chapter discusses how the novel, the ascendant imaginative form in nineteenth-century Europe, did more than broadcast the anthropological turn of secular knowledge: it helped steer it and—under the license of fiction—it pressed it to its limits. As the history of man broke up among competing disciplinary claims on scientific authority after 1800, the novel took over as its universal discourse, modeling the new developmental conception of human nature as a relation between the history of individual persons and the history of the species. The novel's supposed aesthetic disability, its lack of form, now marked its fitness to model the changing form of man. Novels could offer a comprehensive representation of human life—a Human Comedy—in a general writing accessible to all readers, mediated not by specialist knowledge or technical language but by the shared sensibilities that constitute “our common nature.” Thus, novels became active instruments in the ongoing scientific revolution, advancing its experimental postulates that human nature may not be one but many, that humans share their nature with other creatures, that humans have no nature, that the human form is variable, fluid, fleeting—as well as developing a technical practice, realism, to defend humanity's place at the center of nature and at the end of history.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-03DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691175072.003.0005
I. Duncan
This chapter explores Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Dickens brings to a head the Romantic intuition about urban life developed by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo in their novels of Paris: the world-city, the total human habitat, is where human nature comes undone. Monsters belong here, as modern cinema confirms. For all both novels' shared vision of a scale of natural history overwhelming human life, Dickens's leviathan affords an insight the reverse of Melville's. Where the whale is a living creature, the embodiment of a planetary ecosystem, Dickens's dinosaur is a phantasmatic emanation of the Victorian metropolis—an allegorical figure for the “Dickens World.” Against Moby-Dick's sublime vision of the world as a nonhuman natural order, upon which humanity imprints its violent signature of epic striving, the world of Bleak House is unnatural, man-made, an “artificial nature,” which reconstitutes its human origins in the aesthetic mode of the grotesque, according to a genetic logic of monstrosity, and is legible through the techniques of allegory.
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