Epigenetic emergence: reading for growth in Jane Eyre

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Textual Practice on December 17, 2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1417897The potential for an intervention by epigenetics into cultural theory and literary analysis has been a topic of recent inquiry from several directions. However, these approaches sometimes too easily align epigenetics with the Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’, which presumes the direct influence of environment on the existence of particular traits across generations. This emphasis on environment in turn looks back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial science that attributed degrees of civilisation or savagery to the combined influence of heredity and climate. By instead tracing epigenetics in the older concept of ‘epigenesis’ from Romantic biology, we can identify the interpretive role of the organism itself in the expression of inherited traits and in the mediation of environmental stimuli. An epigenetic reading of Jane Eyre identifies how Brontë uses the creative agency of the developing body to challenge the ‘genetic’ and environmental coordinates of racial anthropology. In so doing, she links imperial violence to domestic tyranny and protests against the injustice of both

The Primitive Mind of Silas Marner

This is the published version, also available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/elh.0.0029.This essay investigates the peculiar phenomenon of catalepsy in the context of Eliot’s narrative realism. The primitive mental state depicted in Silas Marner and those reduced social forms that it engenders together obstruct the operation of sympathy—a key feature of Eliot’s organicist aesthetics. Catalepsy, with its sudden and inexplicable reduction of the organism to purely automatic functions, at once bars the narrator from the character’s consciousness and prevents an intuitive study of mind-world through the organs of sympathy that, in Eliot’s other novels, complements the scientific exploration of nature’s still unknown laws.This essay was written with the support of a General Research Fund award from the University of Kansas. I wish to thank Santanu Das, Dorice Elliott, and Pamela Thurschwell for their comments and suggestions

The Made Man and the "Minor" Novel: Erewhon, ANT, and Empire

Bruno Latour has identified the “great novel” as a site for revealing the complex nature of agency in the Anthropocene. As it traces cause and effect through numerous, interrelated events, the “great novel” reveals a vast network of actors—entities, human and non-human—that are neither pure subjects nor pure objects. I examine firstly how novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot depict the agency of non-human things within a network of actors. I then discuss how a self-proclaimed “minor” novel, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), challenges us to think about the colonial implications of the distributed, networked agency represented in “great” Victorian fiction. Erewhon shows how the imbrication of the human and the (in particular) non-human machinate underpins the entrepreneurial success of the colonial adventurer

Marvelous Plasticity and the Fortunes of Species in The Water Babies

This is the author's accepted manuscript. Copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 38, Issue 1, April, 2014. The original publication is available from http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/index.htmlIn The Water-Babies, the wild, wicked child who matures into a man of science appears to “recapitulate” the story of the human rise to preeminence in the animal kingdom. Yet Kingsley uses evolutionary thought precisely to attack the notion of biological/social progress and the suffering it causes. He does so by identifying the impact of the social and physical environment on individual development and inviting us to consider how the physical interaction between developing mind and developing world affects broader patterns of human behavior. Playfully evoking the evolutionary dynamics involving organism, culture, and species-level traits, he points to a form of extragenetic inheritance prompted by open-ended stories

The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes

This is the published version, made available with the permission of the publisher. Copyright 2009, Cambridge University Press.When Dr. Watson first meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the former is an itinerant medical veteran of the Second Afghan War who, sick and rootless, without “kith or kin” in England, is naturally drawn to London, “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the empire are irreversibly drained” (6; ch. 1). Lacking emotional ties, physical strength, and purpose of any real kind, Watson seems to demonstrate the “feverish restlessness” and “blunted discouragement” that Max Nordau described as degenerative symptoms of the age. Watson's identification with urban refuse of the empire, together with his metaphor of the metropolitan landscape as cultural sewer, suggests Nordau's degenerative “feeling[s] of immanent perdition and extinction” (2) and emphasizes both the pervasiveness of modern social decay and the destructive potential of insalubrious influences that lurk within the civilized world as much as they do on its remote peripheries

Crusoe's Farther Adventures: Discovery, Trade, and the Law of Nations

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41467674?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.No abstract is available for this item

The Sentimental Novel and the Republican Imaginary: Slavery in Paul and Virginia

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/stable/465399.No abstract is available for this item

Evolution and Epilepsy in Bleak House

This is the author's accepted manuscript.The original publication is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/studies_in_english_literature/v051/51.4.neill.html.In Charles Dickens's novels, nervous seizures trigger dreamy, clairvoyant episodes in which normally imperceptible connections and relations among events and characters come to light. During such episodes, which the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson would describe as "voluminous" states of consciousness, the boundaries of the self dissolve, and the mind becomes attuned to a range of possible identities or phantom selves. The specters unleashed in this state of nervous "dissolution" haunt Bleak House even as they illuminate relations among members of vastly different social worlds and the great institutional forces that affect the most curious events of the mind

Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel

This record contains only the abstract for the book. Excerpts from this book are available on the Ohio State Press website.For twenty-first-century veterans of the evolution culture wars, Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel, by Anna Neill, makes unlikely bedfellows of two Victorian “discoveries”: evolutionary theory and spiritualism. Victorian science did much to uncover the physical substratum of mystical or dreamy experience, tracing spiritual states to a lower, reflex, or more evolutionarily primitive stage of consciousness. Yet science’s pursuit of knowledge beyond sense-based evidence uncannily evoked powers associated with this primitive mind: the capacity to link events across space and time, to anticipate the future, to uncover elements of the forgotten past, and to see into the minds of others. Neill does not ask how the Victorians explained away spiritual experience through physiological psychology, but instead explores how physical explanation interacted with dreamy content in Victorian accounts of the mind’s most exotic productions. This synthesis, she argues, was particularly acute in realist fiction, where, despite novelists’ willingness to trace the nervous origins of individual behavior and its social consequences, activity in hidden regions of the mind enabled levels of perception inaccessible to ordinary waking thought. The authors in her study include Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hardy

The War on Drugs in the American States: Variations in Sentencing Policies Over Time

Since the 1970s US drug policy has focused on harsh punishments for drug offenders. A wealth of research indicates that the social and political context of the drug policy discourse is a greater factor in determining drug policy than rising rates of drug use or drug-related crime. While considerable research has examined the factors driving federal drug policy, fewer studies have examined drug policy at the state level. This dissertation studies state drug sentencing policy to determine what factors may explain variation across states. By focusing on the period from 1975 to 2002, this study concentrates on policies passed during the War on Drugs era, which began in 1971 and has only recently shown signs of abating. A policy design framework is used to argue that the social constructions of drug offenders—the way in which they are perceived in society—determines the policies directed towards them, and that negative perceptions are likely to result in more punitive policy. This research also hypothesizes that several other factors are likely to influence punitive drug policy, including the desire to control threatening populations, a conservative political environment, and bureaucratic incentives to pursue drug crimes. Using panel data analysis, this study finds partial support for the premises that negative social constructions of drug offenders and bureaucratic incentives affect state drug sentencing policy