Gillian Beer
Biographic Data
| ID | 962858 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gillian Beer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gillian |
| FAMILY NAME | Beer |
| SIGNATURE | BEER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 19 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Island bounds
This chapter deals with two paradigmatic versions of the island: the one contracting towards a final fixed object, the other implicating the island form in large and complex systems of the present and the past. The island has its bounds on the outside, on its encircling parameters. But within islands are also islands - boundaries that may not be crossed, dangerous frontiers, ecological niches occupied and defended. Boundaries, both topographical …
Awkward Encounters
Virginia Woolf
This book for the first time brings together Gillian Beer's essays on Virginia Woolf. Widely recognised as a leading authority on Woolf and a sophisticated critic of modernism and fiction, Beer's essays make fascinating reading. Beer demonstrates, through close investigative textual readings, how Woolf's conceptualisations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing and social and sexual relatio…
Excerpts from The Waves , by Virginia Woolf
GILLIAN BEER, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy since 2001, is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Emerita, and past President of Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge. Her books include Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (3rd ed., 2009), Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer (1996), and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter…
The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
This collaborative History aims to become the standard work on Victorian literature for the twenty-first century. Well-known scholars introduce readers to their particular fields, discuss influential critical debates and offer illuminating contextual detail to situate authors and works in their wider cultural and historical contexts. Sections on publishing and readership and a chronological survey of major literary developments between 1837 and 1…
Desert Island Texts
Darwin's Plots
Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language c…
Darwin and the Uses of Extinction
We currently view extinction with dismay and even horror, but Darwin saw extinction as ordinary and as necessary to evolutionary change. Still, the degree to which extinction is fundamental to his theory is rarely discussed. This essay examines Darwin's linking of the idea of "improvement" with that of natural selection and tracks a cluster of reasons for our changed valuation of extinction now. Those reasons demonstrate how scientific informatio…
On the origin of species
Animal Presences
How close allied are humans and animals.' What are the possibilities of interpretation between them? Can human language encompass animal experience.? Can animals inform our understanding of their natures and our own.? The troubles and the iokes generated from the primary question of kinship between humans and animals have stimulated writers across the centuries. Often in literature animals have stood in for humans: in fables, foxes, geese, and do…
Tributes to Howard E. Gruber
Darwin's Plots
Gillian Beer's landmark book demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other writers pursued and resisted their contradictory implications, and how the stories he produced about natural selection and the struggle for life now underpin our culture. This second edition of Darwin's Plots incorporates a new preface by the author and a foreword by the distinguished America…
How Darwin Changes
Narrative Swerves
Beer explores the legacies of Jean-François Lyotard's proclamation of the death of 'grand narratives', including the gendered dimension of their fall-out in a 'domestication' or everydayness despised because it is perceived to hold no possibilities for invention and newness. Beer does not, however, seek to reinvent 'domestication', but rather to explore the possibilities of the 'narrative swerve': a model of narrative as flexible rather than tota…
Passion, politics, philosophy
Translation or transformation? the relations of literature and science
The theme announced for this lecture, ‘the presentation of science through literature’ might suggest a one-way traffic, as though literature acted as a mediator for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presentation That is not how I understand the relations between the two. I shall emphasize interchange rather than origins and transformation rather than translation. Scientific and literary discourses overlap, bu…
The Observers Observed
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989), £40 hardback. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (Routledge, 1990), £35.00. Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), £21.25 hardback, £12.95 paperback Lond…
Parable, Professionalisation and Literary Allusion in Victorian Scientific Writing
Victorian scientific writing frequently invokes literary allusion or knits parable into argument. What were the functions of these invocations? What light can they throw on the social, ethical, intellectual and even economic conditions of Victorian science? And how do they relate to the processes of professionalisation? Language is a large institution. Within it diverse groups define their identities. The major debate among Victorian language-the…
Darwin and the Novelists
Anxiety and interchange
The power of Darwin's writing in his culture is best understood when it is seen not as a single source or “origin,” but in its shifting relations to other areas of study and creativity. Darwin was immensely alive to concurrent work in a range of disciplines, including race theory, historiography, psychology, and literature. Equally, the problems raised by his writing may manifest themselves more acutely when they are transferred into another fiel…
Darwin and the Uses of Extinction
We currently view extinction with dismay and even horror, but Darwin saw extinction as ordinary and as necessary to evolutionary change. Still, the degree to which extinction is fundamental to his theory is rarely discussed. This essay examines Darwin's linking of the idea of "improvement" with that of natural selection and tracks a cluster of reasons for our changed valuation of extinction now. Those reasons demonstrate how scientific informatio…
Desert Island Texts
Animal Presences
How close allied are humans and animals.' What are the possibilities of interpretation between them? Can human language encompass animal experience.? Can animals inform our understanding of their natures and our own.? The troubles and the iokes generated from the primary question of kinship between humans and animals have stimulated writers across the centuries. Often in literature animals have stood in for humans: in fables, foxes, geese, and do…
Passion, politics, philosophy
Anxiety and interchange
The power of Darwin's writing in his culture is best understood when it is seen not as a single source or “origin,” but in its shifting relations to other areas of study and creativity. Darwin was immensely alive to concurrent work in a range of disciplines, including race theory, historiography, psychology, and literature. Equally, the problems raised by his writing may manifest themselves more acutely when they are transferred into another fiel…
Darwin and the Novelists
Translation or transformation? the relations of literature and science
The theme announced for this lecture, ‘the presentation of science through literature’ might suggest a one-way traffic, as though literature acted as a mediator for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presentation That is not how I understand the relations between the two. I shall emphasize interchange rather than origins and transformation rather than translation. Scientific and literary discourses overlap, bu…
The Observers Observed
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989), £40 hardback. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (Routledge, 1990), £35.00. Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), £21.25 hardback, £12.95 paperback Lond…
Parable, Professionalisation and Literary Allusion in Victorian Scientific Writing
Victorian scientific writing frequently invokes literary allusion or knits parable into argument. What were the functions of these invocations? What light can they throw on the social, ethical, intellectual and even economic conditions of Victorian science? And how do they relate to the processes of professionalisation? Language is a large institution. Within it diverse groups define their identities. The major debate among Victorian language-the…
Passion, politics, philosophy
Darwin's Plots
Gillian Beer's landmark book demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other writers pursued and resisted their contradictory implications, and how the stories he produced about natural selection and the struggle for life now underpin our culture. This second edition of Darwin's Plots incorporates a new preface by the author and a foreword by the distinguished America…
How Darwin Changes
Narrative Swerves
Beer explores the legacies of Jean-François Lyotard's proclamation of the death of 'grand narratives', including the gendered dimension of their fall-out in a 'domestication' or everydayness despised because it is perceived to hold no possibilities for invention and newness. Beer does not, however, seek to reinvent 'domestication', but rather to explore the possibilities of the 'narrative swerve': a model of narrative as flexible rather than tota…
Tributes to Howard E. Gruber
Animal Presences
How close allied are humans and animals.' What are the possibilities of interpretation between them? Can human language encompass animal experience.? Can animals inform our understanding of their natures and our own.? The troubles and the iokes generated from the primary question of kinship between humans and animals have stimulated writers across the centuries. Often in literature animals have stood in for humans: in fables, foxes, geese, and do…
On the origin of species
Darwin's Plots
Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language c…
Darwin and the Uses of Extinction
We currently view extinction with dismay and even horror, but Darwin saw extinction as ordinary and as necessary to evolutionary change. Still, the degree to which extinction is fundamental to his theory is rarely discussed. This essay examines Darwin's linking of the idea of "improvement" with that of natural selection and tracks a cluster of reasons for our changed valuation of extinction now. Those reasons demonstrate how scientific informatio…
Desert Island Texts
The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
This collaborative History aims to become the standard work on Victorian literature for the twenty-first century. Well-known scholars introduce readers to their particular fields, discuss influential critical debates and offer illuminating contextual detail to situate authors and works in their wider cultural and historical contexts. Sections on publishing and readership and a chronological survey of major literary developments between 1837 and 1…
Excerpts from The Waves , by Virginia Woolf
GILLIAN BEER, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy since 2001, is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Emerita, and past President of Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge. Her books include Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (3rd ed., 2009), Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer (1996), and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter…
Virginia Woolf
This book for the first time brings together Gillian Beer's essays on Virginia Woolf. Widely recognised as a leading authority on Woolf and a sophisticated critic of modernism and fiction, Beer's essays make fascinating reading. Beer demonstrates, through close investigative textual readings, how Woolf's conceptualisations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing and social and sexual relatio…
Island bounds
This chapter deals with two paradigmatic versions of the island: the one contracting towards a final fixed object, the other implicating the island form in large and complex systems of the present and the past. The island has its bounds on the outside, on its encircling parameters. But within islands are also islands - boundaries that may not be crossed, dangerous frontiers, ecological niches occupied and defended. Boundaries, both topographical …
Awkward Encounters
Philosophy (13 works) · Art (12 works) · History (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art history (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Literature (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · History (6 works)