Accidents of perception in George Eliot’s "The Lifted Veil"

Abstract

The relationship between science and literature has been a staple topic in literary studies for the past decades, covering aspects ranging from representations of the scientific to more speculative endeavours inquiring into precarious frontiers such as those of temporality and of the human. The following article will tackle a short story by George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, in which the author engages with a literary genre more marginal to her interests, but that nonetheless allows her to showcase her consistent involvement in the scientific and pseudoscientific debates of her time. By focusing on the use of the accident and perception as tropes within Eliot’s narrative, we will analyse the ways in which they contribute to a reflection on the unstable interweaving between science, imagination and morality in the 19th century.