Gregory Tate is a lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of St. Andrews.
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Robert Hunt’s 19th-century fusion of scientific inquiry and poetic imagination shows how empirical discovery and artistic expression can illuminate the natural world together.
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Gregory Tate is a Lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of St. Andrews. His first book, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870, published in 2012, examines the ways Victorian poets both responded and contributed to the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline in 19th-century Britain. He has just completed his second book, Poetical Matter, which studies the exchange of methods, concepts, and language between poetry and the physical sciences in the 19th century.
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Literature, Science, and the Voice of the 1870s
Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition | January | 2025
This chapter explains that in the 1870s, new sound technologies and scientific research changed how writers understood “voice,” while literature also influenced these ideas. Advances in physics and physiology, along with the inventions of the telephone and phonograph, introduced fresh ways to describe how voices are made, carried, and heard. These innovations also suggested that voice wasn’t only human, connecting it to many non-human sounds. Although this challenged traditional ideas of literary voice, writers and scientists found shared concepts. The chapter examines George Eliot’s thoughts on these technologies and Emily Pfeiffer’s sonnets, which explore how scientific models reshape poetry’s vocal nature.
Johns Hopkins University Press | 2009
Tate explores the relationship between Alfred Tennyson's poetry, particularly "Two Voices," and the psychological theories of Herbert Spencer, highlighting Tennyson's views on the embodied mind and its connection to personal and cultural influences.
Publications by this author
Poetical Matter
Springer Nature | June | 2020
Poetical Matter explores how nineteenth-century poetry and science influenced each other. Poets like Wordsworth, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy saw poetry as a way to study the physical world, while scientists such as Humphry Davy, Mary Somerville, and John Tyndall used poetry to shape their ideas and explain science to general readers. The book shows how both groups shared key terms—like “experiment,” “rhythm,” and “sound”—and how debates about waves, motion, and energy connected scientific thinking with poetic form.
The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870
Oxford University Press | November | 2012
The Poet’s Mind explores how Victorian poets understood and wrote about the human mind. Building on Romantic ideas that personal thoughts and feelings were key to poetry, these writers used poems to express and examine mental processes. Gregory Tate explains why psychological ideas became more important in poetry during the mid-1800s, when psychology was developing as a science. Studying poets like Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, and George Eliot, the book shows how their work both used and questioned new scientific theories about how the mind works.
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Feature | May | 2016
Dr Gregory Tate from the University of Surrey runs a seminar on Charles Dickens’ classic novel Oliver Twist.
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