Assessing Intelligence : : The Bildungsroman and the Politics of Human Potential in England, 1860–1910 / / Sara Lyons.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• VerfasserIn: Lyons, Sara,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgements --; Series Preface --; Introduction --; 1 George Eliot’s Moral Intelligence --; 2 Thomas Hardy and the Value of Brains --; 3 Acting Clever in Henry James --; 4 H. G. Wells’s Very Ordinary Brains --; Coda: Virginia Woolf’s Hereditary Genius --; Bibliography --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9781474497688; 9783111319292; 9783111318912; 9783111319186; 9783111318264; 9783110780390
• DOI: 10.1515/9781474497688
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Sara Lyons.

Examines how novelists engaged with the emergence of the IQ concept of intelligence and the meritocratic idealTraces the Victorian genealogy of the modern concept of IQSituates Victorian and Edwardian bildungsromane in relation to the advent of mass education and the rise of eugenic thinkingReveals the centrality of ideas about intellectual ability and disability to five major novelistsTheorises how the novel form engages with the concept of meritocracyHow did Victorian novelists engage with the new theories of human intelligence that emerged from late nineteenth-century psychology and evolutionary science? Assessing Intelligence traces the genealogy of the modern concept of IQ. It examines how five writers – George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf – used the bildungsroman, or the novel of education, to wrestle with the moral and political implications of the IQ model of intelligence and the fantasies of meritocracy it provoked. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, Sara Lyons argues that Victorian and Edwardian novelists were by turns complicit in the biopolitics of intelligence and sought radical ways to affirm the equality of minds.