Beginning with a widespread definition of Decadence as when individual parts flourish at the expense of the whole, Regenia Gagnier - a leading cultural historian of late nineteenth-century Britain - shows the full range of meanings of individualism at the height of its promise. From Darwin and Mill to the Fin de Siècle and beyond, Gagnier establishes the individual in relation to its theoretical and practical contexts: the couple and parent/child dyad; the workshop and community; the nation (...) and state; cosmopolis and world-citizenship. She concludes that the relation of individual to social or part to whole is better understood in terms of dynamic functions than fixed identities. Some highlights in this richly detailed study include: the evolutionary and developmental sciences of the individual; Herbert Spencer and the Individualists; Matthew Arnold and the Culturalists; the New Women, Female Aesthetes, and Socialist Individualists; poetry and the Philosophy of the Will; Gypsy Lorists and Cultural Philanthropy; Nietzsche’s Good Europeans and Late Victorian Cosmopolitans; the doctrine of mystical substitution of the one for the many. No one gives a fuller picture of the individual in modernity. (shrink)

This comparative analysis draws on working-class autobiography, public and boarding school memoirs, and the canonical autobiographies by women and men in the United Kingdom to define subjectivity and value within social class and gender in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Gagnier reconsiders traditional distinctions between mind and body, private desire and public good, aesthetics and utility, and fact and value in the context of everyday life.

The first part of this essay describes a symbiological approach to gender and sexuality; the second, a symbiological approach to world literatures and some examples of gender and sexuality in symbiological literatures. Both are intended to provide more intimate accounts of the Anthropocene than the typical big pictures of global warming and climate change. While grand and world-historical, to be sure, the Anthropocene also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. Both sex and gender should be understood as the (...) outcomes of developmental processes more or less stabilized by a wide variety of more or less variable factors in the loop of nature, culture, and technology. Understanding the nature of these processes and their social, biological, and technological causes is essential for comprehending the nature of gender, sex, and sexuality, and the extent to which these are mutable. The essay concludes with some reflections on love in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines commonly illustrate 3D relationships in diagrams, yet these are often challenging for students. Failing to understand diagrams can hinder success in STEM because scientific practice requires understanding and creating diagrammatic representations. We explore a new approach to improving student understanding of diagrams that convey 3D relations that is based on students generating their own predictive diagrams. Participants’ comprehension of 3D spatial diagrams was measured in a pre- and post-design where students selected the correct 2D (...) slice through 3D geologic block diagrams. Generating sketches that predicated the internal structure of a model led to greater improvement in diagram understanding than visualizing the interior of the model without sketching, or sketching the model without attempting to predict unseen spatial relations. In addition, we found a positive correlation between sketched diagram accuracy and improvement on the diagram comprehension measure. Results suggest that generating a predictive diagram facilitates students’ abilities to make inferences about spatial relationships in diagrams. Implications for use of sketching in supporting STEM learning are discussed. (shrink)

Jean Gagnier’s De vita, et rebus gestis Mohammedis was the first substantial biography of the Prophet Muhammad translated by a European author directly from an authentic Muslim source. Familiar to Edward Gibbon and Voltaire, Gagnier’s work significantly shaped European understandings of the origins of Islam well into the nineteenth century. Yet Gagnier’s scholarship has not been examined in any depth since it was closely read by his contemporaries. This article provides an analysis of Gagnier’s strategies and (...) competencies as a translator and reconstructs his attempt to exploit the Arabic manuscripts then available to an Oxford scholar. It argues that the case of Gagnier is a cautionary reminder that philological approaches to the study of the Muslim past did not necessarily occasion sympathy for Islam. Old prejudices continued to influence Gagnier’s decisions as a translator and were passed on in new forms to later readers. Moreover, aspects of the Muslim historiographical tradition discovered by Gagnier did not necessarily incline his readers to a more positive view of Islam. The increased accessibility of Islamic historical texts could just as easily serve the Christian polemicist as the Enlightened historian. (shrink)