Signs of the Material World
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€58.99
A01=Melissa Frazier
Author_Melissa Frazier
Category=DS
Category=PDX
Dostoevsky and science
dual-aspect monism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
history and philosophy of science
literature and science
mindbody sensation
nineteenth-century literary analysis
ninteenth century novel
social utopianism
Product details
- ISBN 9781487560706
- Weight: 480g
- Dimensions: 155 x 231mm
- Publication Date: 16 Apr 2025
- Publisher: University of Toronto Press
- Publication City/Country: CA
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Melissa Frazier is a professor of Russian language and Russian and comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College.
