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G. H. Lewes and the Impossible Classification of Organic Life.
- Source :
-
Victorian Studies . Spring2015, Vol. 57 Issue 3, p377-386. 10p. 1 Illustration. - Publication Year :
- 2015
-
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]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00425222
- Volume :
- 57
- Issue :
- 3
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Victorian Studies
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 109425663
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.57.3.377