Signs of the Material World

Signs of the Material World traces the literary effects of nineteenth-century materialism that includes the mind and body within a multifaceted “living life.” The book examines a range of scientists, from Auguste Comte and the “vulgar” materialists to Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, George Henry Lewes, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the Russian Nikolai Strakhov. The book sets Fyodor Dostoevsky in complex opposition to his fellow writers, Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, while also explor