Uncommon Sense: Aesthetics, Liberalism, And Late Victorian Cognitive Science

This dissertation argues that cognitive science emerges in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, transforming the relationship between aesthetic experience and political liberalism in the Victorian imagination. New scientific theories of sensory perception and cognition opened an intractable conflict between two liberal principles underlying Victorian notions of aesthetic experience-the commitment to autonomous agency and the necessity of a shared set of agreements about the world for democratic deliberation and debate. Through readings of literary and scientific texts, I argue that this conflict shapes Victorian conceptions of agency, ethics, and art, as well as several of the period's most important texts, events, and movements. Chapters 2 and 3 are case studies of how cognitive science shapes the aesthetic theories governing two major late Victorian novels. Chapter 2, "Raising National Unconsciousness: Neural Writing and Sympathy in Daniel Deronda," argues that George Eliot draws from G.H. Lewes' description of consciousness as a palimpsest of neural pathways in order to conceive of sympathy as a means of rewriting the mind by reflectively reinterpreting experience. Chapter 3, "Reading in the Dark: Sensory Perception and Agency in The Return of the Native," reads Hardy's novel in the context of late Victorian psychological theories that characterize sensory perception as a form of interpretation analogous to reading. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the role of cognitive science in the theories, debates, and controversies that defined the British Aesthetic Movement. Chapter 4, "Beautiful Graffiti: Vernon Lee, Wilhelm Dilthey, and the Democratization of Art" analyzes Lee's and Dilthey's parallel efforts to envision an aesthetic polity in which a perceptual sensus communis is forged and managed by the secret shaping hands of an artistic aristocracy. Chapter 5, "Unchained Harmony: Walter Pater's Ethics of Influence," argues that Pater's writings after The Renaissance attempt to accommodate the ethical imperatives of common sense without sacrificing the teeming, unique sensory details that escape the perceptual norms guiding common sense experience. "Uncommon Sense" thus demonstrates the crucial role of cognitive science in late Victorian literature and culture, arguing for renewed attention to the ongoing dialogues between literature and science that promise the enrichment of both