Equal Natures
eBook - ePub

Equal Natures

Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women's Writing

  1. 256 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Equal Natures

Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women's Writing

About this book

Explores how Victorian women writers used the popular science of phrenology to challenge socially constructed forms of power.

Winner of the 2024 Best Book Award presented by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association

In Equal Natures, Shalyn Claggett argues that Victorian women writers used scientific understandings of the brain to challenge socially constructed forms of power and gender inequality. Focusing on phrenology-the first science of brain localization and the most popular science in nineteenth-century Britain-Claggett shows how these writers leveraged phrenology's premise that the seat of identity is innate rather than acquired to make new claims about women's intellectual abilities and psychological complexity. Whereas male scientists often used phrenology to support racist and colonialist agendas, in the hands of women, an appeal to biology became a tool of subversion. Through historically contextualized analyses of works by Charlotte and Anne Brontë, Harriet Martineau, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot, Equal Natures demonstrates how biology was used to contest conventional understandings of individual identity and interpersonal relations. In doing so, it counters a dominant assumption in feminist theory that essentialism has been the exclusive province of patriarchal values and reactionary political aims.

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Yes, you can access Equal Natures by Shalyn Claggett in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. List of Illustrations
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction
  8. Chapter 1 Feminist Phrenologists and the Battle for the Brain
  9. Chapter 2 Of Two Minds: Charlotte and Anne Brontë’s Use of Innate Psychology
  10. Chapter 3 Harriet Martineau’s Material Rebirth
  11. Chapter 4 Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Physiological Critique of Social Identity
  12. Chapter 5 George Eliot and Biological Destiny
  13. Afterword Battle for the Brain Redux: Brain Imaging, Neurosexism, and Feminist Science
  14. Notes
  15. Works Cited
  16. Index
  17. Back Cover