Read more
This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection interrogating the writings of the writer and public intellectual Vernon Lee (1856-1935) on intelligence. It brings together 13 academics from the UK, Europe, Australia, China, and North America and from disciplines including literature, philosophy, history and cultural studies, to examine Lee s writing (both creative and critical) on intelligence and its implications for the future. Drawing inspiration from Lee s Proteus, or the Future of Intelligence (1925), chapter authors examine Lee s harnessing of intelligence as both concept and process in areas as diverse as material culture, the built environment, gender, ethics and values, ecology, non-violent pacifism, and science. In doing so, they showcase the astonishing prescience and relevance of much of Lee s writing for us in the 21st century.
List of contents
Chapter 1 : Introduction.- Part I : The rise of intelligence in the future?.- Chapter 2 : The Future of Intelligence and the Intelligence of the Future Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.-Chapter 3 : Vernon Lee and the Evolution of Intelligence.- Part II : Pragmatism, belief and the future of intelligence.- Chapter 4 : Prelude to Proteus: Vernon Lee and the Precarity of Belief.- Chapter 5 : Epistemology and Common Sense: Vernon Lee on Intelligence.- Part III Queer(ing) intelligence and the future(s) of gender.- Chapter 6 : The Hope of Changing One s Sex : Vernon Lee and Histories of the Transgender Future.- Chapter 7 : Portrait of the Aesthete as a Child: The Child in the Vatican and Queer Aesthetic Education.- Part IV:Violence, pacifism, and the future of intelligence.- Chapter 8 : A special human product called the Past : Vernon Lee s Metahistorical Imagination.- Chapter 9 : Normal kinship and the great multifold otherness of the world : the ecologies of antiwar thinking in Vernon Lee s Satan the Waster.- Part V : Ecological intelligence and the future.- Chapter 10 : Queer Entanglement in Vernon Lee s The Enchanted Woods.- Chapter 11 : Vernon Lee s Ecological Inheritance.- Part VI : the future of art and creativity.- Chapter 12 : Do Androids Dream of Vernon Lee? (I) : Turn-of-the-Century Aesthetics and Refik Anadol s Networks of Contemplation.- Chapter13 : Do Androids Dream of Vernon Lee? (II) : Intelligence, Spontaneous Multiplication and Aesthetic Responsiveness.
About the author
Sally Blackburn-Daniels
is a Research Fellow at Teeside University, UK. They are a founding member of the International Vernon Lee Society (2014) and is currently a Vice-President of the IVLS, having previously served as its Communications Officer.
Shafquat Towheed
is Director of Research in the School of Arts and Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at The Open University, UK, where he also directs the OpenARC Research Centre and the History of Books and Reading research group. He is a Vice-President and founding member of the International Vernon Lee Society (IVLS) and is currently Vice President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). His most recent publication (with Corinna Norrick-Rühl) is
Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic
(2022).
Summary
This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection interrogating the writings of the writer and public intellectual Vernon Lee (1856-1935) on intelligence. It brings together 13 academics from the UK, Europe, Australia, China, and North America and from disciplines including literature, philosophy, history and cultural studies, to examine Lee’s writing (both creative and critical) on intelligence and its implications for the future. Drawing inspiration from Lee’s
Proteus, or the Future of Intelligence
(1925), chapter authors examine Lee’s harnessing of intelligence as both concept and process in areas as diverse as material culture, the built environment, gender, ethics and values, ecology, non-violent pacifism, and science. In doing so, they showcase the astonishing prescience and relevance of much of Lee’s writing for us in the 21st century.
