Assessing Intelligence by Lyons, Sara;

Rövid leírás:

Examines how novelists engaged with the emergence of the IQ concept of intelligence and the meritocratic ideal

Hosszú leírás:

How did Victorian novelists engage with the new theories of human intelligence that emerged from late nineteenth-century psychology and evolutionary science? Assessing Intelligence traces the genealogy of the modern concept of IQ. It examines how five writers – George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf – used the bildungsroman, or the novel of education, to wrestle with the moral and political implications of the IQ model of intelligence and the fantasies of meritocracy it provoked. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, Sara Lyons argues that Victorian and Edwardian novelists were by turns complicit in the biopolitics of intelligence and sought radical ways to affirm the equality of minds.

Tartalomjegyzék:

Introduction

Chapter One: George Eliot’s Moral IntelligenceChapter Two: Thomas Hardy and the Value of BrainsChapter Three: Acting Clever in Henry JamesChapter Four: HG Wells’s Very Ordinary BrainsCoda: Virginia Woolf’s Hereditary Genius

Bibliography