Character: As Much an Exterior Thing as a Tree or a Rock
What can character in fiction tell us about character in reality? This talk shows 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. Paying special attention to the formal and philosophical interventions of women and feminist realists between 1870 and 1920, Brilmyer demonstrates 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.
Live streamed from Concordia University, Montreal