Dying to Know : Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England

In "Dying to Know", eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the 19th century? Levine shows that for 19th-century scientists, novelists, poets and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue and salvation, one must die. "Dying to Know" is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defence of the pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge.