“The Novel and the Heart: 1840–1940” examines the heart as a focus of experiential description in anglophone fiction of the Victorian (1837–1901) and modernist (1901–1939) periods. Methodologically, it requires a multi-disciplinary approach, bringing together expertise in both the health humanities and the history and theory of the novel. This expertise was acquired by conducting training-through-research at the University of Bristol and Stanford University, which are internationally outstanding centres for research in these two respective fields, reflected by Bristol’s Centre for Health, Humanities, and Science (CHHS) and Stanford’s Center for the Study of the Novel (CSN).
The primary output of this project is a monograph, Cardiac Realism: The Affective Life of the Modern Novel. The monograph aims to achieve the following objectives: 1. Examine how novelists register, reshape, or reject medical and/or cultural significations of the heart. 2. Identify the contemporary scientific discoveries that influence the fiction and the form in which they do so. 3. Explore how novelists manifest or navigate the tension between the perceived universality of the human heart on the one hand and specifically gendered and racialised characterisations on the other. 4. Chart how the trope interacts with the stylistic and formal innovations (most obviously the advent of free indirect discourse and interior monologue) that characterise this crucial period in the history of the novel.
The research carried out through the action generated new knowledge about literary, scientific, and cultural understandings of embodiment and emotion in the Victorian and modernist periods. The consensus of previous cultural histories of the heart is that cardio-centric understandings of emotion ceased to have cultural prominence some time between William Harvey’s circulation of the blood in 1628 and the localisation of mental functions at the beginning of the 19th century. The research for this action shows that, in fact, physiologists and physicians in the Victorian and modernist period exhibited an extraordinary reluctance to accept that the heart might be a mere pump for circulating blood around the body and have no greater intrinsic relation to a person’s emotional life than any other organ. It was the contested nature of cardio-centric understandings of emotion in this period that made the heart a uniquely valuable tool for novelists who wanted their fiction to promote more bodily conceptions of emotional experience. Examples of scientific discoveries that influence Victorian and modernist fiction uncovered and investigated by the action include: Thomas Hardy’s dramatisation of the audibility of the heart, responding to the invention of the stethoscope, and Ford Madox Ford’s response to paradigm shift in heart medicine brought about by the new cardiology, which disaggregated cardiac and psychological diagnoses, and in doing so cast doubt on the relation between psychiatric and cardiac disorder that had been central to Victorian medical practice. One of the distinctive features of heart-writing in novels of the Victorian and modernist periods is the use of the trope to interrogate the extent to which emotion is universally human or culturally specific (against the backdrop of the emergence of evolutionary theory, race science, and emotion studies), exemplified by May Sinclair’s highly gendered and D. H. Lawrence’s racialised representations of cardiac feeling. The research of the action sheds light on a tradition of Victorian and modernist novelists who objected to the model of experience that free indirect discourse and interior monologue is premised on, and juxtaposed these overly-cerebral techniques with their own innovative, heart-centred strategies of affective description. In doing so, it pluralises our understanding of realism and modernism as movements that encompass an array of traditions, animated by fundamentally distinct understandings of human experience.
