1. G. H. Lewes and the Impossible Classification of Organic Life.
- Author
-
CHARISE, ANDREA
- Subjects
INFLUENCE (Literary, artistic, etc.) ,AGING ,PHILOSOPHY & literature ,CLASSIFICATION ,NINETEENTH century ,HISTORY ,INTELLECTUAL life - Abstract
This paper discusses George Henry Lewes's study of living matter in The Physiology of Common Life (1859-60). Despite the physiological materiality of its subject, Lewes's text often discusses states of life that defy clear-cut classification. The process of human aging is a particularly confounding example of life and death's indeterminacy because, as Lewes describes, older age invokes both the physiological and aesthetic intermingling of animal life with stone, petrifaction, and minerality. I argue that Lewes's discussion of aging in Chapter XIII draws directly from the earlier geological research of Charles Lyell and, with brief reference to illustrative examples elsewhere in Victorian writing, I show the ways in which the Lewesian understanding of aging as a state of suspension between animality and minerality is reliant upon and a spur for the nineteenth-century literary imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015
- Full Text
- View/download PDF