Signs of the Material World: Dostoevsky, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Synopsis

Signs of the Material World traces the literary effects of nineteenth-century materialism that includes the mind and body within a multifaceted “living life.” The book examines a range of scientists, from Auguste Comte and the “vulgar” materialists to Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, George Henry Lewes, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the Russian Nikolai Strakhov.The book sets Fyodor Dostoevsky in complex opposition to his fellow writers, Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, while also exploring the formal connections that he shares with contemporaries across Europe and the United States, including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Friedrich Schiller. Melissa Frazier argues that Dostoevsky’s art serves as his science, both in his reliance on plot and in his recourse to an often-extravagant figurative language.This combined literary and scientific practice reflects Dostoevsky’s transnational and interdisciplinary reading; it also transforms our own. In George Eliot’s words, Dostoevsky “changes the lights for us.” Once drawn into his orbit, Eliot herself no longer looks quite the same. Finally, Signs of the Material World argues that Eliot and Dostoevsky’s particular strain of nineteenth-century materialism lends itself to an ambivalent political stance, as they both confront the certainties of social utopianism with a deliberate embrace of ambiguity.

Copyright:

2025

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781487560720

Related ISBNs:

9781487560706, 9781487560713

Publisher:

University of Toronto Press

Date of Addition:

04/08/25

Copyrighted By:

University of Toronto Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Science, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.