Dames, Nicholas. “‘The Withering of the Individual’: Psychology in the Victorian Novel.” A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2005.

Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870. NY: Oxford UP, 2001.

Daston, Lorraine. “British Responses to Psycho-Physiology, 1860-1900.“ Isis 69 (1979): 192-208.

Faas, Ekbert. Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

Logan, Peter. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-century British Prose (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1997).

Matus, Jill. Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

“Victorian theories of shock and trauma necessarily relied on a different understanding of the architecture of the mind, and often emphasized the role of intense emotion rather than that of [Freudian theories of] repressive memory . . . . Matus provides astute readings of novels by Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot and Stevenson. She stresses the various ways in which Victorian fiction not only pilfered these pretraumatic theories but also played an active role in imagining, observing and conceptualizing the possible effects of shock on the psyche.“ — David McAllister, TLS (19 February 2010)

Ryan, Vanessa. "Reading the Mind: From George Eliot's Fiction to James Sully's Psychology." Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 615-35.

“James Sully, an exponent of the new physiological psychology, is perhaps best known for his Studies of Childhood (1895), his early use of questionnaires, his training of mothers as lay scientific observers. . . . He is also known for . . . the influence his work had on Sigmund Freud.“

Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe' of a Beginning New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Sully, James. "George Eliot's Art." Mind 6 (1881): 378-94.

Tayloy, Jenny Bourne. “Obscure Recesses: Locating the Victorian Unconscious.” Writing and Victorianism. Ed. J. B. Bullen. London: Longman, 1997. 137-79.

“The physiologist William B. Carpenter first introduced theory of ‘unconscious cerebration’ in 1854, in the fourth edition of his Principles of Human Physiology, to dscribe the circumvention of conscious, rational thought.” — Vanessa L. Ryan (see above)

Vrettos, Athena. "From Neurosis to Narrative: The Private Life of the Nerves in Villette and Daniel Deronda" Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 551-79.

Young, Kay. "Middlemarch and the Problem of Other Minds Heard." Literature Interpretation Theory 14 (2003): 223-41.


Last modified 27 February 2002