Victorian Literature in the Looking Glass of Psychology

Download or read book Victorian Literature in the Looking Glass of Psychology written by Melinda Gorgan and published by Ethics International Press. This book was released on 24-11-08 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Literature in the Looking Glass of Psychology is an interdisciplinary study that observes the changes in literary character construction throughout the Victorian Age. Pursuing the epistemologically altered character construction over the years from the beginning to the end of the Victorian era, the book covers a range of titles that demonstrate that the progress of psychology, was responsible for the way the workings of the mind were understood. It addresses the changes that characters underwent in the fifty years passing from Jane Eyre to Dracula. The influence of psychology on literature is tracked step by step through the Victorian age, starting with Charlotte Brontë's Bildungsroman and Dickens’s realism, and ending with the inward turn, the focus on the psychological mechanisms of the individual, in Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker. For scholars interested in an up-to-date critical approach to Victorian literature, focusing on interdisciplinarity, discourse negotiations, and psychosynthetic literary analysis, the book will be a valuable reference source.