Assessing Intelligence

Know about the book -

Assessing Intelligence is written by Sara Lyons and published by Edinburgh University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1474497691 (ISBN 10) and 9781474497695 (ISBN 13).

How did Victorian novelists engage with the new theories of human intelligence that emerged from late nineteenth-century psychology and evolutionary science? Assessing Intelligence traces the genealogy of the modern concept of IQ. It examines how five writers - George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf - used the bildungsroman, or the novel of education, to wrestle with the moral and political implications of the IQ model of intelligence and the fantasies of meritocracy it provoked. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Ranciere, Sara Lyons argues that Victorian and Edwardian novelists were by turns complicit in the biopolitics of intelligence and sought radical ways to affirm the equality of minds.