Assessing Intelligence: The Bildungsroman and the Politics of Human Potential in England, 1860 1910

ISBN-13: 9781474497664 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 288 str.

Sara Lyons

Opis

How did Victorian novelists engage with the new theories of human intelligence that emerged from late nineteenth-century psychology and evolutionary science? Assessing Intelligence traces the genealogy of the modern concept of IQ. It examines how five writers George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf used the bildungsroman, or the novel of education, to wrestle with the moral and political implications of the IQ model of intelligence and the fantasies of meritocracy it provoked. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Ranciere, Sara Lyons argues that Victorian and Edwardian novelists were by turns complicit in the biopolitics of intelligence and sought radical ways to affirm the equality of minds.

Spis treści

Introduction

Chapter One: George Eliot’s Moral Intelligence
Chapter Two: Thomas Hardy and the Value of Brains
Chapter Three: Acting Clever in Henry James
Chapter Four: HG Wells’s Very Ordinary Brains
Coda: Virginia Woolf’s Hereditary Genius

Bibliography