This handbook offers a comprehensive survey of the growing field of literary age studies and points to new directions in scholarly research.
Literary Criticism
“Wicked problems”: humanities advocacy’s need for history of humanities
November 2023
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Journal article
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History of Humanities
Advocates for the humanities have ongoing need of good work in the history of
humanities as they canvas evidence of how the field has, in the past, sought to describe its
contributions to knowledge and articulate the importance of its distinctive concentration on
the objects, media, and value of culture. Apprehending better which arguments have been
persuasive contextually and which have fared less well can help to sharpen defences for the
future and avoid errors of description (not least those that arise from blinkered perspectives
on whose culture and whose history are worth attending to). This forum contribution
considers the need to take a wide view of which disciplinary histories will be relevant—
reinforcing the Introduction’s observation that history of the humanities continues to
develop in close connection with history of knowledge, construed more generally. In recent
years numerous advocates have advanced claims that humanities disciplines are well
equipped (even uniquely equipped) to handle “wicked problems”—intractably complex
problems germane to the future flourishing of our societies and the planet. Returning to the
origins of the “wicked problems” concept within late 1960s urban planning, and subsequent
disputes within the social sciences over its validity, I argue that deploying it persuasively on
behalf of the humanities will require careful attention to a history which has left it with
uneven traction in other disciplines.
wicked problems, history of science, humanties advocacy, interdisciplinarity
‘Do Birds Disagree?: The Place of Aesthetic Value in Advocacy for the Humanities’
July 2022
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Chapter
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The Question of the Aesthetic
aesthetic value, advocacy for the humanities, evolutionary biology, Ishiguro, Kazuo, beauty, birds
Artificial Intelligence: George Eliot, Ernst Kapp, and the Projections of Character
March 2020
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Journal article
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19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century
Speech beyond toleration: On Carlyle and moral controversialism now
October 2017
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Journal article
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New Literary History
This essay takes a historical approach to a current problem: how to read and respond to the argumentative practices of the moral and political controversialist in a context where it is vividly clear that some of the norms that frame and regulate “free speech” are contested by the controversialist. Thanks to Amanda Anderson and others, we have rich critical vocabularies for describing the complex ethos of modern liberalism and its norms of public argument as they developed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Controversialism, I suggest, presents a difficult challenge to liberal expectations of free speech. The moral controversialist may be antinormative in the sense that s/he is consciously rule-breaking but not rule-denying; s/he may also be antinormative in a deeper sense, denying the value of norms others consider settled. The impulse in the more aggressively antinormative case is sometimes merely contrarian; it may reflect alternative values; in the most problematic cases it emanates from denial of the existence of norms. By way of probing the relationship between normative and antinormative thinking about free speech, this essay returns to one of the most notorious literary and political controversialists of the nineteenth century. I argue that Thomas Carlyle’s deliberate offences against progressive sentiment in his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849), and John Stuart Mill’s robust response, provide a helpful historical basis from which to consider similar challenges today to normative views of public argument and styles of expression.
Vanity Fair
June 2015
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Scholarly edition
Caprice: Individual Subjectivity in Literary Criticism
January 2015
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Chapter
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Literary Values
Does Self-Identity Persist into Old Age?
January 2015
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Chapter
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The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging
Fully Accountable
May 2014
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Journal article
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New Literary History
Assisted Living: “Acting Naturally” in Room 335
January 2014
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Journal article
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Age, Culture, Humanities
Documentary film and television have played, and continue to play, a major role in shaping public conversations about standards of care today for those in later life who are no longer able to live independently. The starkest example in the UK in recent years was the BBC Panorama documentary <em>Undercover Care: The Abuse Exposed</em>, aired in May 2011, which contributed heavily to official denunciation of the Care Quality Commission as “unfit for purpose.” This paper looks in detail at a less gruelling example of the genre. Neither an exposé of malpractice nor a fly-on-wall documentary, Room 335 (HBO Documentary Films, 2006) is closer to participant anthropology—though it is not quite that either. The paper, delivered as a plenary lecture to the British Society of Gerontology Annual Conference, September 2013, makes a case for valuing the quality of the film’s improvisational, non-“findings driven” engagement with its subjects, and the light it sheds on the nature and significance of friendship in old age. The film can be downloaded from Apple iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/ca/artist/andrew-jenks/id563448630.
aging, care of the aged, Andrew Jenks, assisted living, ageing, film
The Value of the Humanities
October 2013
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Book
In The Value of the Humanities prize-winning critic Helen Small assesses the value of the Humanities, eloquently examining five historical arguments in defence of the Humanities.
History
The literary example in moral philosophy today
June 2013
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Journal article
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boundary 2
The standard claim made for literary examples in moral philosophy is that they assist moral reasoning by offering appropriately complex descriptions of the conditions under which moral decisions are made or might plausibly be made. This essay offers a critical examination of that claim, exploring the attractions of literary exemplarity for moral philosophy of several kinds since the 1960s but also the constrained terms under which the invitation to deep reflectiveness is permitted to operate. The essay then considers why many recent moral philosophers (with the partial exception of Bernard Williams) have preferred quasi- or faux-literary examples, developing a kind of stripped-down or gestural literariness that offers the benefits of just enough, not too much, complexity.
Dispensing with Style
January 2013
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Chapter
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Dickens's Style
<p>‘I dispense with style’, M. Blandois/Rigaud tells Abel Flintwinch, with a Gallic wave of the hand (<em>LD</em>, i, 30, 345). He does and does not mean it. The lack of any stylistic attractions, any marks of fashion or elegance, about the Clennam house is irrelevant to Blandois’s purposes there, and no obstacle to pressing an entry; he is, at the same time and in his own person, an excrescence of style – a florid incursion of melodramatic mannerism into the mix of styles that constitutes and troubles Dickensian realism – one that must ultimately be <em>‘squashed’</em> (to borrow Garrett Stewart’s apposite verb) to permit a harmonious narrative conclusion for <em>Little Dorrit</em>.</p> <p>Critics standardly observe that Dickensian stylistic excess has a companion principle, a kind of counterweight in restraint or adherence to ‘limits’. It is a less obvious proposition that there might be, beyond this tension or contest between the unleashing and the control of expressive energy, and outside the specific acts of repression required for Dickens’s novels to conclude, any effort towards ‘plain style’. Applied across the whole career, the proposal would not (to invoke one of Dickens’s favoured objects of humour) have legs. But the first part of this essay tests the claim that, in so far as he had a worked-out theory of style (he had clear principles and gave consistent advice to others, but never spelled out a complete ‘theory’), he afforded a high place to Hazlitt’s definition of ‘plain style’. The virtues expressed in the idea of ‘plain style’ were at the heart of his sense of how good writing is to be distinguished from bad, and in many aspects of his writing he both abided by them himself and encouraged (or directed) others to do so.</p>
Subjectivity, Psychology and the Imagination
January 2012
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Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
The Function of Antagonism: Miroslav Holub and Ronald Hoffmann
January 2012
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Chapter
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Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions
The Eustace Diamonds
May 2011
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Scholarly edition
The Forms of Liberalism
January 2011
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Journal article
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Victorian Studies
Argument as Conflict: Then and Now
January 2010
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Chapter
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Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Wuthering Heights
October 2009
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Scholarly edition
“What We Really Want Most out of Realism … ”: Feminist Theory and the Return of the Real
April 2008
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Chapter
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Adventures in Realism
Firstly, through photography's unprecedented reportorial role, photography diminishes the requirement, as in realist painting, to encode anti-bourgeois meaning through the reordering or displacement of bourgeois appearances; and secondly