Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination

At the end of the sixteenth century, scholars and intellectuals were seen as Faustian magicians, dangerous and sexy. By the nineteenth century, they were perceived as dusty and dried up, “dead from the waist down,” as Browning so wickedly put it. In this erudite and entertaining book, a renowned literary critic explores the various ways we have thought about scholars and scholarship through the ages.
A.D. Nuttall focuses on three people, two real and one fictitious: the classical scholar Isa...