"In 1843, the Victorian political theorist John Stuart Mill outlined a new science, "the science of the formation of character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer shows that it survived in the work of Victorian novelists, who cultivated a narrative science of human nature. Brilmyer explores this characterological project in the work of such novelists as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. Bringing to life Mill's unrealized dream of a science of character, Victorian realists used fiction to investigate the nature of embodied experience, how traits and behaviors in human and nonhuman organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features-shapes, colors, and gestures-come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. In the hands of these authors, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the universal laws governing human life. The Science of Character offers brilliant insights into important novels of the period, including Eliot's Middlemarch, and a fuller picture of English realism during the crucial span between 1870 and 1920"--

by Anthony M. Benis, Sc.D., M.D. This is a paperback Second Edition of the version published in 1985 by Psychological Dimensions Press, updated to 2008. It is the original version of the NPA personality theory derived from the ideas of Karen Horney. The NPA traits, posited to be of genetic origins, are narcissism, perfectionism and aggression. The text is written in question-and-answer (Q & A) format. Book properties: Oversize paperback (7.4"" x 9.7""), 521 pages, 19 figures, 7 tables, 48 plates, glossary, addendum, index. Glossy cover: the front and back covers may be seen [here]. ISBN 978-0-615-26214-7

Gale Researcher Guide for: Stories of Human Character: W. Somerset Maugham is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Condensation of Robert Owen's view on human development, as set out in the reformer's A new view of society, originally published in 1813.