Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book written in English in the nineteenth century, transformed the way we looked at the world. It is usually assumed that this is because the idea of evolution was so staggeringly powerful. Prize-winning author George Levine suggests that much of its influence was due, in fact, to its artistry; to the way it was written. Alive with metaphor, vivid descriptions, twists, hesitations, personal exclamations, and humour, the prose is imbued with the sorts of tensions, ambivalences, and feelings characteristic of great literature. Although it is certainly a work of "science," the Origin is equally a work of "literature," at home in the company of celebrated Victorian novels such as Middlemarch and Bleak House, books that give us a unique yet recognisable sense of what the world is really like, while not being literally 'true'. Darwin's enormous cultural success, Levine contends, depended as much on the construction of his argument and the nature of his language, as it did on the power of his ideas and his evidence. By challenging the dominant reading of his work, this impassioned and energetic book gives us a Darwin who is comic rather than tragic, ebullient rather than austere, and who takes delight in the wild and fluid entanglement of things.

Darwin the Writer

Literature & Fiction

Levine, George

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

"Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials, and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is remarkable. This elegant and evocative look at the move toward objectivity first pioneered by Descartes sheds new light on some old and still perplexing problems in modern science." Bernard Lightman, York University, Canada In Dying to Know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century? Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die. Dying to Know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge.

Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England

University of Chicago Press

In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that the Victorian realists and the later modernists were in fact doing similar things in their fiction: they were trying to use language to get beyond language. Levine sees the history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel as a continuing process in which each generation of writers struggled to escape the grip of convention and attempted to create new language to express their particular sense of reality. As these attempts hardened into new conventions, they generated new attempts to break free.

The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly

History & Criticism

Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

Levine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad. "Levine stands in our day as the premier critic and commentator on Victorian prose."—Frank M. Turner, Nineteenth-Century Literature. "Magnificently written, with a care and delicacy worthy of its subject."—Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania

One Culture: Essays Sci/Lit (Science & Literature)

In this volume, the first in the series Science and Literature, editor George Levin has brought together the contributions of historians, critics, and philosophers of science to explore these relationships. From the preface: "The interaction between science and literature has been a subject of growing concern in criticism; the languages of science have increasingly found their way into literature and into discussions of it. And the traditional assumptions that literary people care nothing about science, scientists care nothing about literature have been belied throughout the twentieth century but particularly in recent years. There remain, however, large gaps of knowledge and of misunderstanding that make fruitful interchange and informed discussion difficult to achieve. And while this series will be aimed primarily at a literary audience, we are hoping to be of use as well to historians and philosophers of science at a level high enough to ensure the respect if not the agreement of the scientific community. While the series will not take a 'position' in relation to controverted questions and will leave the directions of the arguments to the highly qualified and independent scholars and critics it seeks, it does grow from three assumptions, first, that science and literature are two alternative but related expressions of a culture's values, assumptions, and intellectual frameworks; second, that understanding science in its relation to culture and literature requires some understanding not only of its own internal processes, but of the pressures upon it exercised by social, political aesthetic, psychological, and biographical forces; third, that the idea of 'influence' of one upon the other must work both ways — it is not only science that influences literature, but literature that influences science. These assumptions, of course, are not uncontroversial, and they impinge on such large issues as the question of 'representation' in literature and entail corollaries —about such matters as the 'rationality' of science, or the degree to which it actually describes reality—that are at the center of contemporary battles within the philosophy of science. We hope that this series will throw light on these matters. The subject is enormous, its importance inescapable. Vague as the enterprise may occasionally seem when viewed in the abstract, its significances are clear when we get down to cases, as the authors of the several essays in this volume do. The range of questions they address intimates the ambitions of the series."

University of Wisconsin Press

In this volume, the first in the series Science and Literature, editor George Levin has brought together the contributions of historians, critics, and philosophers of science to explore these relationships. From the preface: "The interaction between science and literature has been a subject of growing concern in criticism; the languages of science have increasingly found their way into literature and into discussions of it. And the traditional assumptions that literary people care nothing about science, scientists care nothing about literature have been belied throughout the twentieth century but particularly in recent years. There remain, however, large gaps of knowledge and of misunderstanding that make fruitful interchange and informed discussion difficult to achieve. And while this series will be aimed primarily at a literary audience, we are hoping to be of use as well to historians and philosophers of science at a level high enough to ensure the respect if not the agreement of the scientific community. While the series will not take a 'position' in relation to controverted questions and will leave the directions of the arguments to the highly qualified and independent scholars and critics it seeks, it does grow from three assumptions, first, that science and literature are two alternative but related expressions of a culture's values, assumptions, and intellectual frameworks; second, that understanding science in its relation to culture and literature requires some understanding not only of its own internal processes, but of the pressures upon it exercised by social, political aesthetic, psychological, and biographical forces; third, that the idea of 'influence' of one upon the other must work both ways — it is not only science that influences literature, but literature that influences science. These assumptions, of course, are not uncontroversial, and they impinge on such large issues as the question of 'representation' in literature and entail corollaries —about such matters as the 'rationality' of science, or the degree to which it actually describes reality—that are at the center of contemporary battles within the philosophy of science. We hope that this series will throw light on these matters. The subject is enormous, its importance inescapable. Vague as the enterprise may occasionally seem when viewed in the abstract, its significances are clear when we get down to cases, as the authors of the several essays in this volume do. The range of questions they address intimates the ambitions of the series."

Essays & Correspondence

MARY SHELLEY's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus grew out of a parlor game and a nightmare vision. The story of the book's origin is a famous one, first told in the introduction Mary Shelley wrote for the 1831 edition of the novel. The two Shelleys, Byron, Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori (Byron's physician) spent a "wet, ungenial summer in the Swiss Alps." Byron suggested that "each write a ghost story." If one is to trust Mary Shelley's account (and James Rieger has shown the untrustworthiness of its chronology and particulars), only she and "poor Polidori" took the contest seriously. The two "illustrious poets," according to her, "annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task." Polidori, too, is made to seem careless, unable to handle his story of a "skull-headed lady." Though Mary Shelley is just as deprecating when she speaks of her own "tiresome unlucky ghost story," she also suggests that its sources went deeper. Her truant muse became active as soon as she fastened on the "idea" of "making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream": "'I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others."' The twelve essays in this collection attest to the endurance of Mary Shelley's "waking dream." Appropriately, though less romantically, this book also grew out of a playful conversation at a party. When several of the contributors to this book discovered that they were all closet aficionados of Mary Shelley's novel, they decided that a book might be written in which each contributor-contestant might try to account for the persistent hold that Frankenstein continues to exercise on the popular imagination. Within a few months, two films--Warhol's Frankenstein and Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein--and the Hall-Landau and Isherwood-Bachardy television versions of the novel appeared to remind us of our blunted purpose. These manifestations were an auspicious sign and resulted in the book Endurance of Frankenstein.

The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel

Knoepflmacher, U. C.

Reference

University of California Press

Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science

George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays develops the key themes of his work: the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature, culture and science and the relation of knowledge and truth to ethics. The essays offer perspectives on George Eliot, Thackeray, the Positivists, and the Scientific Naturalists, and reassess the complex relationship between Ruskin and Darwin. In readings of Lawrence and Coetzee, Levine addresses Victorian and modern efforts to push beyond the limits of realist art by testing its aesthetic and epistemological limits in engagement with the self and the other. Some of Levine's most important contributions to the field are reprinted, in revised and updated form, alongside previously unpublished material. Together, these essays cohere into an exploration both of Victorian literature and culture and of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic problems fundamental to our own times.

Cambridge University Press

Darwin’s theory thrust human life into time and nature and subjected it to naturalistic rather than spiritual or moral analysis. Insisting on gradual and regular–lawful–change, Darwinian thought nevertheless requires acknowledgment of chance and randomness for a full explanation of biological phenomena. George Levine shows how these conceptions affected nineteenth–century novelists―from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad―and draws illuminating contrasts with the pre–Darwinian novel and the perspective of natural theology.
Levine demonstrates how even writers ostensibly uninterested in science absorbed and influenced its vision. A central chapter treats the almost aggressively unscientific Trollope as the most Darwinian of the novelists, who worked out a gradualist realism that is representative of the mainstream of Victorian fiction and strikingly consonant with key Darwinian ideas. Levine’s boldly conceived analysis of such authors as Scott and Dickens demonstrates the pervasiveness and power of this revolution in thought and sheds new light on Victorian realism.

Harvard University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Levine, George. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Levine, George

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Levine, George. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Darwin the Writer

Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England

The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly

Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

One Culture: Essays Sci/Lit (Science & Literature)

One Culture: Essays Sci/Lit (Science & Literature)

The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel

Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science

Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science

Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction