Victorian Fiction and the Origins of Modern Feeling Summerhays, Rebecca creator 2011 vii, 178 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011) Armstrong, Nancy Director Rooney, Ellen Reader Reichman, Ravit Reader Ryan, Vanessa Reader Brown University. English sponsor theses This dissertation explores the transpersonal forms of thinking and feeling that became imaginable in the nineteenth century, when Victorian literature and science together defined the human as a principally biological being. For a diverse group of naturalists and scientists writing in the nineteenth century, including William Paley, Sir Charles Bell, and Charles Darwin, the definition of the human body was by no means stable. If the debate for these scientists and naturalists centered upon the question of how to theorize and represent the body�s construction, governance, and development, nineteenth-century fiction was particularly adept at testing, reconfiguring, and naturalizing the new forms of human feeling and affiliation these emergent accounts of the body made thinkable. The novels I discuss, including Frankenstein (1818), Jane Eyre (1847), Tess of the D�Urbervilles (1891), and Dracula (1897) are especially sensitive to how human feeling, cognition, and affiliation must change under these new and competing accounts of the body. Beginning with Frankenstein, these novels resist the classificatory logic that prioritizes the enlightened processes of observation, reflection, sympathy, and self-regulation over impulse. The subjects that we find in these novels manage their behavior by acting upon sensations collected through the body�s multiple and contradictory seats of consciousness. By arguing that impulse, rather than sympathy and tolerance, unites humans to one another, the novels I discuss preclude the possibility that humanity can cohere as a community of autonomous subjects, or that fiction participates at all in the production of a tolerant human community. These novels eliminate the distinctions separating human subjects and conjoin all in a single species body. For these novels, this collective form of human being is perfectly adapted to a shifting, diffuse modern world. The shared instincts and nervous impulses that bind the kind of aggregate subject we find in Jane Eyre or Dracula permit instantaneous, transpersonal modes of feeling, thinking, and communication. The knowable universe in these novels accordingly expands to include information that can impulsively and instantaneously spread, independent of the mind�s direction. Victorian fiction history of the novel Literature and scienceEvolutionNatural theologyNeurosciencesImpulseBildungsromansDomestic fiction RPB 20111003 engEnglish10.7301/Z0668BF0In CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations