ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book comprises a series of readings in what used to be called the psychological novel. Instead, there was something far more interesting: a succession of attempts throughout the Victorian period to extend the emotional range of prose fiction and to refine the portrayal of mental life. Eros and psyche serve here, not as technical terms, but as heavily laden images which suggest a broad distinction that the course of this book attempt to sharpen. Butterfly, bird, breath, smoke - psyche has traditionally suggested the evanescent or incorporeal aspects of subjective experience. The imaginative endeavor to find a structure for the emotions and a figure for the mind had particular texts as its arena, and although it had its own tangled history which will be considered in its place, first concern must be with the fictions themselves.