Realism, Ethics and Secularism Essays on Victorian Literature and Science [Paperback]

A collection of essays by one of the most important scholars of Victorian literature and culture.George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays extends and develops the key themes of his life's work: the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature, culture and science and the relation of knowledge and truth to ethics.George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays extends and develops the key themes of his life's work: the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature, culture and science and the relation of knowledge and truth to ethics.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of Levine's most important contributions to the field are reprinted, in revised and updated form, alongside previously unpublished material.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.1. Introduction; Part I. The Subject Broached: Otherness, Epistemology, and Ethics: 1. George Eliot and the hypothesis of reality; Part II. Ethics Without God, or, Can 'Is' be 'Ought': 2. Is life worth living?; 3. Ruskin and Darwin and the matter of matter; 4. Scientific discourse as an alterl£)