Harriet Martineau as a Fiction Writer and Nineteenth-Century Psychology

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K02310
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: J. F. Oberlin University
• Principal Investigator: Ohtake Maiko 桜美林大学, 人文学系, 准教授 (60352704)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: Harriet Martineau / David Hartley / Unitarianism / Associationism / Anna Barbauld / psychology / Monthly Repository / religious tract

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), who is known as a Victorian writer and social reformer, wrote several didactic tales for the youth between the 1820s and the early 1830s as a novice writer. This study shows how these stories reflect the associationist idea of the mind by David Hartley, an eighteenth-century moral philosopher, whom Martineau admired in her youth. It also locates Martineau’s idea of the mind and her representation of one’s inner life in the Unitarian intellectual tradition, where Anna Barbauld, who was also influenced by Hartley’s theory a generation earlier, wrote poems and children’s stories. It is revealed that Martineau inherited Barbauld’s attitude which emphasized the importance of rational thinking and moral feelings connected to various physical sensations.

Free Research Field

人文学