'Be Sure and Remember the Rabbits': Memory as Moral Force in the Victorian Bildungsroman

Recent work in Victorian studies and the bildungsroman

“…Cohn's Still Life also exemplifies the growing critical impetus to reappraise the Victorian bildungsroman in the light of the period's scientific materialism and physiological psychology. As her book and recent articles by Jill Ehnenn (), Natalie Huffels (), Elisabeth Jay (), and Anna‐Julia Zwierlein () clarify, a large body of Victorian scientific theory undermined the Enlightenment optimism upon which the ideal of bildung was founded. Although this is not an explicit aim of Cohn's book nor of any of the aforementioned articles, their shared concern with how Victorian novelists engaged with contemporary sciences of the mind also complicates conventional distinctions between the Victorian and the modernist bildungsroman .…”