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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century
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Dying to Know - Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Hardcover, 2nd ed.)
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Dying to Know - Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Hardcover, 2nd ed.)
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""Dying to Know" is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the
peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials,
and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is
remarkable. This elegant and evocative look at the move toward
objectivity first pioneered by Descartes sheds new light on some
old and still perplexing problems in modern science."--Bernard
Lightman, York University, Canada
In "Dying to Know," eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark
contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge.
This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal
of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and
disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of
selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the
nineteenth century?
Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists,
poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions
of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken
as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues,
were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving
pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make
its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one
must die.
"Dying to Know" is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of
epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited
defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical
significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a
shareable form of knowledge.
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