- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Online publication date:
- August 2016
- Print publication year:
- 2014
- Online ISBN:
- 9780748694594
22 August 2024: Due to technical disruption, we are experiencing some delays to publication. We are working to restore services and apologise for the inconvenience. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/cambridge-university-press-publishing-update-following-technical-disruption
Traces the development of critical moral psychology in the central novels of the Brontés and George Eliot. This book explains how, under the influence of the new 'mental materialism' that held sway in mid-Victorian scientific and medical thought, the Brontés and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology. This was one no longer bound by the idealizing presuppositions of traditional Christian moral ideology, and, as Henry Staten argues, is closely related to Nietzsche's physiological theory of will to power (itself directly influenced by Herbert Spencer). On this reading, Staten suggests, the Brontés and George Eliot participate, with Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, in the beginnings of the modernist turn toward a strictly naturalistic moral psychology, one that is 'non-moral' or 'post-moral'.
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