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 will also include other genres, such as travel writing, in which many authors described foreign places, objects, and people as a method of positioning their own identities. Science will also be broadly considered, most importantly as both an epistemology and a practice, two areas that are united in their nineteenth-century form by an allegiance to evolution as the driving force of natural and social development. Evolutionary science inflected many aspects of the ways nineteenth-century writers constructed themselves and others in their narratives. This especially applied to those termed as ‘heroes’ or ideal specimens of humanity. Life-writing took in fields as diverse as psychology, natural history, genealogy, museology and music, each of which became vehicles for narrating human relationships with nature, society, and themselves.