A01=Sara Lyons
Author_Sara Lyons
Bildungsroman
biopolitics
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
education
Edwardian novel
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
equality
eugenics
human intelligence
meritocracy
Victorian novel
Product details
- ISBN 9781474497664
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 21 Oct 2022
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Sara Lyons is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Kent. She is the author of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt, and Secularisation (Legenda, 2015) and various journal articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century literature and culture. Between 2017 and 2019, she was the Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded project entitled ‘Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880-1920’. This book is a product of that project.
