Dead from the waist down : scholars and scholarship in literature and the popular imagination
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Dead from the waist down : scholars and scholarship in literature and the popular imagination
Yale University Press, c2003
Available at 5 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
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  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
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  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
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  Okayama
  Hiroshima
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  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
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  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-221) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
At the end of the 16th century, scholars and intellectuals were seen as Faustian magicians, dangerous and sexy. By the 19th century, they were perceived as dusty and dried up, "dead from the waist down", as Browning so wickedly put it. In this study, a literary critic explores the various ways we have thought about scholars and scholarship through the ages. A.D. Nuttall focuses on three people, two real and one fictitious: the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon who lived from 1559 to 1614; Mark Pattison, 19th-century rector at Oxford; and Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's "Middlemarch". The three are intricately related, for Pattison was seen by many as the model for Eliot's Mr Casaubon and he was also the author of the best book on Isaac Casaubon. Nuttall offers a penetrating interpretation of "Middlemarch" and then describes how Pattison recorded his own introverted intellectual life and self-lacerating depression. He presents Isaac Casaubon, on the other hand, as a fulfilled scholar who personifies the ideal of detailed, unspectacular truth-telling, often imperilled in our own culture. Nuttall concludes with a meditation on morality, sexuality and the true virtues of scholarship.
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