Lucy Hartley – författare

In Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture, first published in 2001, Lucy Hartley examines the emergence of physiognomy as a form of popular science. Physiognomy posited an understanding of the inner meaning of human character from observations of physical appearances, usually facial expressions. Taking the physiognomical teachings of Johann Caspar Lavater as a starting-point, Hartley considers the extent to which attempts to read the mind and judge character through expression can provide descriptions of human nature. She argues that the writings of Charles Bell, and the Pre-Raphaelites establish the significance of the physiognomical tradition for the study of expression whilst also preparing the ground for the rise of new doctrines for the expression of emotion by Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer. She then demonstrates how the evolutionary explanation of expression proposed by Spencer and Charles Darwin is both the outcome of the physiognomical tradition and the reason for its dissolution.

In Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture, first published in 2001, Lucy Hartley examines the emergence of physiognomy as a form of popular science. Physiognomy posited an understanding of the inner meaning of human character from observations of physical appearances, usually facial expressions. Taking the physiognomical teachings of Johann Caspar Lavater as a starting-point, Hartley considers the extent to which attempts to read the mind and judge character through expression can provide descriptions of human nature. She argues that the writings of Charles Bell, and the Pre-Raphaelites establish the significance of the physiognomical tradition for the study of expression whilst also preparing the ground for the rise of new doctrines for the expression of emotion by Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer. She then demonstrates how the evolutionary explanation of expression proposed by Spencer and Charles Darwin is both the outcome of the physiognomical tradition and the reason for its dissolution.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.