For twenty-first-century veterans of the evolution culture wars, Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel, by Anna Neill, makes unlikely bedfellows of two Victorian "discoveries" evolutionary theory and spiritualism. Victorian science did much to uncover the physical substratum of mystical or dreamy experience, tracing spiritual states to a lower, reflex, or more evolutionarily primitive stage of consciousness. Yet science's pursuit of knowledge beyond sense-based evidence uncannily evoked powers associated with this primitive mind: the capacity to...
For twenty-first-century veterans of the evolution culture wars, Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel, b...
This book explores fantastic Victorian and early Edwardian fictions--utopias, dystopias, nonsense literature, gothic horror, and children’s fables—as responses to Darwinian anthropology after 1860.
This book explores fantastic Victorian and early Edwardian fictions--utopias, dystopias, nonsense literature, gothic horror, and children’s fablesâ€...
