Wave-Theories and Affective Physiologies: The Cognitive Strain in Victorian Novel Theories

Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions

“…Recognition of a time in the past when scholars of literature and psychology readily conversed with one another about narrative aesthetics need not render us nostalgic, for these scientists and critics worked without the advantages of the precise vocabulary, analytic techniques, and technological advances that make interdisciplinary conversations about narrative and the emotions possible today. Yet they did possess a singular enabling condition, the late Victorian assumption that psychologists and literary theorists had something valuable to say to one another, even, as in the case of Alexander Bain, E. S. Dallas, Émile Hennequin, and G. H. Lewes, by contributing to both fields or drawing on physiological experiments to discuss narrative aesthetics (Dames 2004). Today we shout across a ravine, never certain that those on the other side can-or want to-hear our invitations, decode our queries, or respond in language that we can comprehend.…”

Dickens, Victorian Mental Sciences and Mnemonic Errancy

“…Associationist models of cognition and memory, dominant until at least the mid-century, 13 In states of insanity brought about by some great shock, we see this morbid tendency to resuscitate the dead past fully developed, and remote events and circumstances becoming confused with present ones. On the other hand, in more healthy states of mind there presents itself an exactly opposite tendency, namely, an impulse of the will to banish whatever when recalled gives pain to the furthest conceivable regions of the past.…”