This lively, accessible account of works by Edward Bulwer, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad explains why many Victorians nursed a hostile vision of man and society and how misanthropy - once a means of conveying integrity and justified disdain of society's excesses - turned immoral and quasi-criminal. Delivering a surprising new perspective on the past, Christopher Lane shows that the fanatics troubling us today share many qualities with our supposedly moral ancestors.
Christopher Lane teaches literature at Northwestern University and is a recent Guggenheim fellow. A London-born literary critic and intellectual historian, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Chronicle Review, and many other newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of, most recently, The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011). His other books include Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), winner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing (France) and highly commended by the British Medical Association, translated into French, Spanish, Danish, Japanese, and Korean.
He writes a popular blog for Psychology Today called "Side Effects" (recent posts appear to the right). He also writes regularly for the Huffington Post.
