The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature

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Paperback
2017
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Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remains one of the more fascinating aspects of that era. As mind and emotion were increasingly understood in terms of biology, aesthetic experience began to be thought of less as abstract judgment and more as an interaction between the nervous system and the materiality of art. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others, to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way that nineteenth-century writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking aspects of contemporary literary and cultural criticism such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as being incontrovertibly intertwined.

Synopsis

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remains one of the more fascinating aspects of that era. As mind and emotion were increasingly understood in terms of biology, aesthetic experience began to be thought of less as abstract judgment and more as an interaction between the nervous system and the materiality of art. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others, to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way that nineteenth-century writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking aspects of contemporary literary and cultural criticism such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as being incontrovertibly intertwined.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 380
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 01 May 2017
ISBN 10: 022646220X
ISBN 13: 9780226462202

Media Reviews

More than just a sweeping and thoroughly researched study of Victorian aesthetics, The Outward Mind thus attempts to recuperate the philosophical and methodological value of the materialist tradition that it explicates. Throughout, Morgan expertly handles a breathtaking assortment of scientific, critical, and literary sources, whose overlapping themes and approaches demonstrate the real permeability of disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth century. The book is steeped, too, in several rich bodies of modern scholarship concerning aesthetics, science, and culture; if anything, Morgan's own striking argument about outwardness is occasionally lost in his sometimes cumbersome recitations of extant research. But for its generous and expansive account of the oft-overlooked field of Victorian psychological aesthetics, its fascinating prehistory of interdisciplinarity, and its suggestive insights into the state of the humanities today, The Outward Mind is essential reading for literary scholars both within and outside Victorian studies. --Lindsay Wilhelm Nineteeth-Century Literature
Morgan's outstanding study decisively transforms the existing scholarship on Victorian aesthetic theory. A book of immense scope, The Outward Mind weaves together a unique array of sources, from the leaders of the Edinburgh Aesthetic Club to brilliant theorists such as Walter Pater and Vernon Lee. Moreover, Morgan provides students of the humanities with conceptual tools and historical analyses that can productively address developments in emergent fields such as neuro-aesthetics. --Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles
Morgan builds a new history of life out of past efforts. The Outward Mind explores the Victorian heyday of what he calls 'materialist aesthetics, ' through which 'the plane of meaning recurrently collapses into the plane of materiality'.... It might be that The Outward Mind offers a prehistory of what Jameson famously diagnosed as 'the waning of affect' under postmodernism. --Modern Intellectual History
Outstanding in science studies is Benjamin Morgan's dazzling book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Morgan reconstructs a robust tradition that turns out to permeate Victorian thought: the idea that the mind is a material object, composed of atoms, fibers, etc.... Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this important study is that Morgan provides a heretofore underread tradition for what we do ourselves. This corporeal, material tradition leads to object-oriented ontology and digital humanities (and Morgan has discovered an astonishing early example of digital humanities, a computer discourse analysis from 1901). When we react against New Criticism, close readings, or symptomatic reading, therefore, we are not breaking new critical ground so much as we are adhering to a two-centuries-long tradition of trying to understand reading practices as material processes. --Talia Schaffer SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
Morgan has a staggeringly nimble eye for surprisingly fruitful overlaps....Deeply satisfying is the care with which the book defines terms that have become prominent but sometimes unrigorously wielded hot words: Form becomes the geometric ratios in nature that attuned the embodied mind to its formal environments. Response names the process by which aesthetic reaction was made evolutionary, determined by change over deep time, rather than personal or spiritual. Empathy means bodily response to the rhythmic patterns of music, art, or prose.
--Irena Yamboliev Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Filled with significant scholarly arguments and critical insights, The Outward Mind offers an account of scientific and aesthetic thought as locked in a frequently dialectical and always dialogic relationship. It is very likely to jumpstart a series of new investigations within the field. --John Plotz, Brandeis University
The Outward Mind is a remarkable achievement. It is the most generous, broadly conceived, and philosophically sensitive account of Victorian scientific aesthetics available. By writing the history of an aesthetics that refused history, Morgan poses important questions: how do we want to imagine the embodiment of aesthetic experience, and what kinds of history are appropriate to that imagination? --Nicholas Dames, Columbia University
The Outward Mind is most remarkable for its staggering scope. Morgan draws together the history of Kantian aesthetics, Linnaean concepts of artistic response, early natural theology, Victorian narrative history and art criticism, and twentieth-century literary formalism into a tightly woven narrative that tells the story of how humans understand their relations to art. Morgan clearly and cogently illuminates a dizzying web of networks between writers, artists, natural theologians and physiologists - a feat that will arouse the interest of both literary scholars and historians of science. Most exciting is the book's unexpected but nonetheless convincing pairings of figures like Walter Pater, William Morris, Thomas Hardy and Vernon Lee with scientists like Grant Allen, James Sully, Alexander Bain and Edmund Gurney. --The British Journal for the History of Science

Author Bio

Benjamin Morgan is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.