Extended Consciousness and the Wisdom Paradox: Eliot’s and Dostoevsky’s Last Novels

This chapter describes embodied emotions in relation to the British and Russian writers’ final novels (1876, 1881). That emotions are transformed neurologically through maturity and aging is rarely discussed in literary criticism. Elkhanon Goldberg’s contributions to the neural changes that come with aging in The Wisdom Paradox offer a missing conceptual link. What appears as an arbitrary literary coupling indicates a moment in late nineteenth-century European literature when intellectual pressures from natural science weighed heavily upon both Eliot and Dostoevsky, each obsessed with recovering an ethical/religious basis for living and loving they doubted could be sustained: in Eliot’s case through Judaism; in Dostoevsky’s, Christianity.