Science and Self-Construction in Nineteenth-Century Life-Writing

This research conversation will consider how nineteenth-century life-writers used science to construct narratives of personal and national identity. Through life-writing often focuses on the genres of biography and autobiography, this discussion takes inspiration from Hermione Lee’s definition of biography as ‘the story of a person told by someone else’ – and we might add, or by themselves, and through a variety of interpretive means. Specifically, life-writing includes genres in which writers construct their own identities by writing about something else, such as in travel-writing; it can also include visual objects such as portraiture, designed to narrate a person’s life. Science will also be broadly considered, both as an epistemology of empiricism and as specific practices and methods for gaining knowledge. Much of nineteenth-century science can be construed as evolutionary naturalism, by which evolutionary theory becomes the driving force of a human’s relationship to self, nature, and societal structures. 

Evolutionary science inflected many aspects of the ways nineteenth-century writers constructed themselves and others in their narratives. Life-writing was, at once, a scientific method itself, a forum for professing one’s own commitment to naturalism, and a framework for defining the characteristics of ‘heroes’ and other ideal specimens of humanity. Life-writing took in fields as diverse as psychology, natural history, geneaology, political theory, museology and music. Each of these became areas in which life-writers negotiated human rationality and irrationality, timelessness and decay, and even the natural and the supernatural. 

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