Overview

Explores the coevolution of Absolute idealist philosophy and British fiction from the Romantic period forward. Absolute Fiction examines the principal form of idealism in the modern period, Absolute idealism, which posits that mind and matter must be understood in relation to all of reality-the universe, the Absolute. This premise was variously articulated by philosophers and writers from Germany, Britain, India, and beyond. Absolute Fiction traces a genealogy from the creative adoption of Hinduism and German Idealism by Coleridge and Carlyle to Aldous Huxley's novelization of Advaita Vedānta. Justin Prystash argues that canonical figures, such as Hegel and George Eliot, as well as overlooked ones, such as May Sinclair and Anukul Chandra Mukerji, found in the Absolute a provocation to account for more and more swaths of reality-accounts that required, at the limits of philosophy, fictional prosthetics. The thematic and formal experimentation of Romanticism, realism, science fiction, horror/weird fiction, and modernism all draw upon Absolute idealism to reconceive subjectivity and ethics. These experiments, far from being antithetical to contemporary literary criticism, reveal it to be more idealist than many would like to acknowledge.

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""Absolute Fiction contributes to our understanding of Victorian and modern literature by being the first book, to my knowledge, that truly focuses on the imbrication of this literature with the philosophical ideas that dominated British intellectual culture at the time: Absolute idealism. This book thus fills a significant gap and will be the touchstone for future scholarship and criticism."" — Adela Pinch, author of The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living

Author Information

Justin Prystash is Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University.

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