Chapter 1 - Realism and Psychology

Summary

This chapter highlights the newly significant role of embodiment in the discourses of realist aesthetics and theory of mind across the 1860s. Developing conterminously (though not in lockstep), the discourses of aesthetic realism and psychology at this time endowed material reality – including the mind – with new relevance, insisting on the interdependence of body and mind and on the fundamental sameness of scientific and psychological inquiry, whose shared pursuit was advancing the “science of human nature.” More particularly, this chapter moves beyond a familiar emphasis on the role of visual aesthetics to feature other emergent or developing discourses important to realism, including theories of sound, psychology and perception, and motion, and even ital atomic theory and what E.S. Dallas, in The Gay Science (1866), described as “the science of the laws of pleasure.”