What can character in fiction tell us about character in reality?
This talk will discuss how Victorian novelists engaged materialist science and philosophy to transform the notion of “character” from the inner truth of an individual to an observable, material formation produced through shifts in the boundaries between a figure’s interior and exterior.
Speaker Pearl Brilmyer will pay special attention to the formal and philosophical interventions of women and feminist realists between 1870 and 1920. Brilmyer will show how writers such as George Eliot and Olive Schreiner worked to claim a fundamental stratum of ontology for literature at a time when knowledge of “reality” was increasingly thought to be the province of the sciences.
How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.
