Title: Dying to know
Subtitle: scientific epistemology and narrative in Victorian England
First published: 2002
Description: "Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. Thc Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: History, History and criticism, English prose literature, Science, Philosophy, Influence, Narration (Rhetoric), Literature and science, Science in literature, Knowledge, Theory of, in literature, Descartes, rene, 1596-1650, English prose literature, history and criticism, Knowledge, theory of, Science, philosophy
Places: Great Britain
People: René Descartes (1596-1650)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PR788.S33 L48 2002