Peter Logan: Victorian Fetishism [Audio interview]

Peter Logan is the author of Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (1997) and, more recently, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (2009). On May 15, 2012, Fred Rowland interviewed Peter Logan to discuss Victorian Fetishism, which details the development of ideas about the primitive and how these concepts set the boundaries of culture in Victorian Britain. Drawing from Lucretius, Vico, and Auguste Comte, Peter Logan explains how fetishism – the defining feature of culture’s absence – figured in the works of literary and cultural critic Matthew Arnold, realist novelist George Eliot, and anthropologist Edward Tylor.