Product Description

In its nuanced examination of a wide variety of Victorian theories of mind, including physiognomy, physiology, associationism, and cognitive philosophies, Amnesiac Selves draws a powerful portrait of the interaction between psychology and the novel in the years 1810-1870. Dames demonstrates the crucial role that novels played in forming a habit of diluting remembrance into secure, sentimental, and above all communal memories, habits that live on in the nostalgia still felt by their readers. In tracing the formative nostalgias of canonical British fiction, this study recalls for us what these novels so often ask us to forget. Provocative and original, Amnesiac Selves constitutes a major advance in studies of Victorian culture and literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1194192 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Review
"Amnesiac Selves is a highly intelligent, stimulating work, which will keep readers in constant dialogue. Dames is a skilful close reader of texts, and moves deftly between individual analysis and general claim."--Sally Shuttleworth, Victorian Studies
"If a major challenge of analyzing the Victorian novel is the sheer excess of material, Nicholas Dames's Amnesiac Selves...brilliantly argues that forgetting that detail is central not only to interpreting those novels but to the structure of the novels themselves."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Amnesiac Selves is an insightful book, and its insights are important. Nicholas Dames develops in this helpful volume a revisionist view of memory in the early Victorian novel, a view so innovative it not only illuminates our modern perspective of the Victorian mental landscape, it reshapes it.... This careful study deserves reading. Even if you don't agree as enthusiastically as I do with Nicholas Dames' analysis of Victorian views of memory from 1810 through 1870, I will be surprised if those views don't stimulate review of your personal world view. If the way we remember the past matters, Amnesiac Selves..., with its meticulously detailed revision of our picture of Victorian memory, bears thinking about."--Steven C. Walker, Studies in the Novel
"[An] excellent study.... Dames provides a detailed and innovative account of the intersections between literary and psychological views of memory in the nineteenth century.... In charting the strategic and self-willed amnesias of the Victorians, Dames illuminates how nostalgia became a cultural habit and a way of reading the past that persists to this day."--Albion

About the Author
Nicholas Dames is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University