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Hardcover, 166 pages Borrowed from the libraryPublished 2009 Read December 2012 |
by Thomas Albrecht
I think I found this book by searching "victorian epistemology" in Worldcat. It's a decent book, I think, but it turned out to be less generally applicable than one might like: Albrecht is really interested in the phenomenon he calls the "medusa effect," which has three parts: 1) there is a visual confrontation with a dangerous object that threatens to destabilize or destroy, 2) there is an interposition of a protective representation, such as a mirror or painting, and 3) there is a second confrontation in the protective representation, which has its own dangers. Somewhat interesting, but very focused; Albrecht examines this phenomenon in a Freud essay, a Nietzsche monograph, the works of Walter Pater and A. C. Swinburne, and George Eliot's The Lifted Veil. He concludes the Victorians (which I suppose he defines broadly) have a less stable idea of mimesis than we often assume, but other than that, there's not much here that broadly applicable, even to those interested in Victorian epistemology.
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