This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection interrogating the writings of the writer and public intellectual Vernon Lee (1856-1935) on intelligence. It brings together 13 academics from the UK, Europe, Australia, China, and North America and from disciplines including literature, philosophy, history and cultural studies, to examine Lee's writing (both creative and critical) on intelligence and its implications for the future. Drawing inspiration from Lee's Proteus, or the Future of Intelligence (1925), chapter authors examine Lee's harnessing of intelligence as both concept and process in areas as diverse as material culture, the built environment, gender, ethics and values, ecology, non-violent pacifism, and science. In doing so, they showcase the astonishing prescience and relevance of much of Lee's writing for us in the 21st century.

First interdisciplinary collection to interrogate the writings of Vernon Lee on intelligence Wide-ranging chapters include perspectives from queer studies, ethics, material culture, ecocriticism and pacifism Historically contextualised chapters reveal Lee's views in relation to current debates about AI, work and creativity

Autorentext

Sally Blackburn-Daniels is the Impact Acceleration Fellow at Teesside University, UK. They have co-organised several conferences on Lee, including Dedication: Unfurling Vernon Lee’s Kinship Networks (2024), Vernon Lee, Empathy and Aesthetics (2022) and Vernon Lee 2019: An Anniversary Conference (2019) and Order and Chaos: Vernon Lee's Politics of Disruption (2026). They are long-term collaborators with Associazione Culturale il Palmerino (Florence) and worked with them on the first theatrical performance of Lee's The Ballet of the Nations. 

**Shafquat Towheed **is Director of Research in the School of Arts and Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at The Open University, UK, where he also directs the OpenARC Research Centre and the History of Books and Reading research group. He is a Vice-President and founding member of the International Vernon Lee Society (IVLS) and is currently Vice President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). His most recent publication (with Corinna Norrick-Rühl) is Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2022).

Inhalt

Chapter 1 : Introduction.- Part I : The rise of intelligence in the future?.- Chapter 2 : The Future of Intelligence and the Intelligence of the Future Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.-Chapter 3 : Vernon Lee and the Evolution of Intelligence.- Part II : Pragmatism, belief and the future of intelligence.- Chapter 4 : Prelude to Proteus: Vernon Lee and the Precarity of Belief.- Chapter 5 : Epistemology and Common Sense: Vernon Lee on Intelligence.- Part III Queer(ing) intelligence and the future(s) of gender.- Chapter 6 : The Hope of Changing One's Sex : Vernon Lee and Histories of the Transgender Future.- Chapter 7 : Portrait of the Aesthete as a Child: The Child in the Vatican and Queer Aesthetic Education.- Part IV:Violence, pacifism, and the future of intelligence.- Chapter 8 : A special human product called the Past: Vernon Lee's Metahistorical Imagination.- Chapter 9 : Normal kinship and the great multifold otherness of the world : the ecologies of antiwar thinking in Vernon Lee's Satan the Waster.- Part V : Ecological intelligence and the future.- Chapter 10 : Queer Entanglement in Vernon Lee's The Enchanted Woods.- Chapter 11 : Vernon Lee's Ecological Inheritance.- Part VI : the future of art and creativity.- Chapter 12 : Do Androids Dream of Vernon Lee? (I) : Turn-of-the-Century Aesthetics and Refik Anadol's Networks of Contemplation.- Chapter13 : Do Androids Dream of Vernon Lee? (II) : Intelligence, Spontaneous Multiplication and Aesthetic Responsiveness.