An Elusive Victorian

Author : Martin Fichman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2010-11-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226246154

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An Elusive Victorian by Martin Fichman Pdf

Codiscoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace should be recognized as one of the titans of Victorian science. Instead he has long been relegated to a secondary place behind Darwin. Worse, many scholars have overlooked or even mocked his significant contributions to other aspects of Victorian culture. With An Elusive Victorian, Martin Fichman provides the first comprehensive analytical study of Wallace's life and controversial intellectual career. Fichman examines not only Wallace's scientific work as an evolutionary theorist and field naturalist but also his philosophical concerns, his involvement with theism, and his commitment to land nationalization and other sociopolitical reforms such as women's rights. As Fichman shows, Wallace worked throughout his life to integrate these humanistic and scientific interests. His goal: the development of an evolutionary cosmology, a unified vision of humanity's place in nature and society that he hoped would ensure the dignity of all individuals. To reveal the many aspects of this compelling figure, Fichman not only reexamines Wallace's published works, but also probes the contents of his lesser known writings, unpublished correspondence, and copious annotations in books from his personal library. Rather than consider Wallace's science as distinct from his sociopolitical commitments, An Elusive Victorian assumes a mutually beneficial relationship between the two, one which shaped Wallace into one of the most memorable characters of his time. Fully situating Wallace's wide-ranging work in its historical and cultural context, Fichman's innovative and insightful account will interest historians of science, religion, and Victorian culture as well as biologists.

Author : Edward Beasley
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2010-07-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781136923999

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The Victorian Reinvention of Race by Edward Beasley Pdf

In mid-Victorian England there were new racial categories based upon skin colour. The 'races' familiar to those in the modern west were invented and elaborated after the decline of faith in Biblical monogenesis in the early nineteenth century, and before the maturity of modern genetics in the middle of the twentieth. Not until the early nineteenth century would polygenetic and racialist theories win many adherents. But by the middle of the nineteenth century in England, racial categories were imposed upon humanity. How the idea of 'race' gained popularity in England at that time is the central focus of The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences. Scholars have linked this new racism to some very dodgy thinkers. The Victorian Reinvention of Race examines a more influential set of the era's writers and colonial officials, some French but most of them British. Attempting to do serious social analysis, these men oversimplified humanity into biologically-heritable, mentally and morally unequal, colour-based 'races'. Thinkers giving in to this racist temptation included Alexis de Tocqueville when he was writing on Algeria; Arthur de Gobineau (who influenced the Nazis); Walter Bagehot of The Economist; and Charles Darwin (whose Descent of Man was influenced by Bagehot). Victorians on Race also examines officials and thinkers (such as Tocqueville in Democracy in America, the Duke of Argyll, and Governor Gordon of Fiji) who exercised methodological care, doing the hard work of testing their categories against the evidence. They analyzed human groups without slipping into racial categorization. Author Edward Beasley examines the extent to which the Gobineau-Bagehot-Darwin way of thinking about race penetrated the minds of certain key colonial governors. He further explores the hardening of the rhetoric of race-prejudice in some quarters in England in the nineteenth century – the processes by which racism was first formed.

Author : Deborah Denenholz Morse,Martin A. Danahay
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351875950

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Victorian Animal Dreams by Deborah Denenholz Morse,Martin A. Danahay Pdf

The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. The conclusion by Harriet Ritvo, the pre-eminent authority in the field of Victorian/animal studies, provides valuable insight into the burgeoning field of animal studies and points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.

Author : Joseph Packer
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2015-09-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781498513029

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Alien Life and Human Purpose by Joseph Packer Pdf

Alien Life and Human Purpose provides a rhetorical examination of the way major historical figures connect their arguments for the absence of alien life, or unity, to their philosophical, religious, and ethical agendas. Packer contends that unity had a complimentary mythic function and continues to shape modern social values. This work will be of interest to rhetoricians, philosophers, historians, and theologists.

Author : Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2004-12-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780801881541

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Victorian Literature and the Victorian State by Lauren M. E. Goodlad Pdf

Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.

Author : Tina Gianquitto
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2014-06-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780820346908

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America's Darwin by Tina Gianquitto Pdf

While much has been written about the impact of Darwin's theories on U.S. culture, and countless scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed the specific details of Darwin's theories as a cultural force affecting U.S. writers. America's Darwin fills this gap and features a range of critical approaches that examine U.S. textual responses to Darwin's works. The scholars in this collection represent a range of disciplines--literature, history of science, women's studies, geology, biology, entomology, and anthropology. All pay close attention to the specific forms that Darwinian evolution took in the United States, engaging not only with Darwin's most famous works, such as On the Origin of Species, but also with less familiar works, such as The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Each contributor considers distinctive social, cultural, and intellectual conditions that affected the reception and dissemination of evolutionary thought, from before the publication of On the Origin of Species to the early years of the twenty-first century. These essays engage with the specific details and language of a wide selection of Darwin's texts, treating his writings as primary sources essential to comprehending the impact of Darwinian language on American writers and thinkers. This careful engagement with the texts of evolution enables us to see the broad points of its acceptance and adoption in the American scene; this approach also highlights the ways in which writers, reformers, and others reconfigured Darwinian language to suit their individual purposes. America's Darwin demonstrates the many ways in which writers and others fit themselves to a narrative of evolution whose dominant motifs are contingency and uncertainty. Collectively, the authors make the compelling case that the interpretation of evolutionary theory in the U.S. has always shifted in relation to prevailing cultural anxieties.

Author : James Poskett
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2022-02-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226820644

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Materials of the Mind by James Poskett Pdf

Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters stretching around the globe. Materials of the Mind tells the story of how phrenology changed the world--and how the world changed phrenology. This is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. Drawing on far-flung museum and archival collections, and addressing sources in six different languages, Materials of the Mind is the first substantial account of science in the nineteenth century as part of global history. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history could help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.

Author : Peter J. Bowler
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2013-03-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780226068671

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Darwin Deleted by Peter J. Bowler Pdf

A history of science text imagining how evolutionary theory and biology would have been understood if Darwin had never published his "Origin of Species" and other works.--publisher summary.

Author : Evelleen Richards
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2020-05-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9780429883446

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Ideology and Evolution in Nineteenth Century Britain by Evelleen Richards Pdf

Written over several decades and collected together for the first time, these richly detailed contextual studies by a leading historian of science examine the diverse ways in which cultural values and political and professional considerations impinged upon the construction, acceptance and applications of nineteenth century evolutionary theory. They include a number of interrelated analyses of the highly politicised roles of embryos and monsters in pre- and post- Darwinian evolutionary theorizing, including Darwin’s; several studies of the intersection of Darwinian science and its practitioners with issues of gender, race and sexuality, featuring a pioneering contextual analysis of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection; and explorations of responses to Darwinian science by notable Victorian women intellectuals, including the crusading anti-feminist and ardent Darwinian, Eliza Lynn Linton, the feminist and leading anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe, and Annie Besant, the bible-bashing, birth-control advocate who confronted Darwin’s opposition to contraception at the notorious Knowlton Trial.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 498 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : English literature
ISBN : IND:30000111200147

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Victorian Review by Anonim Pdf

Author : Peter J. Bowler
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 493 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2009-09-08
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780520261280

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Evolution by Peter J. Bowler Pdf

Since its original publication in 1989, Evolution: The History of an Idea has been recognized as a comprehensive and authoritative source on the development and impact of this most controversial of scientific theories. This twentieth anniversary edition is updated with a new preface examining recent scholarship and trends within the study of evolution.

Author : Thomas Dixon,Geoffrey Cantor,Stephen Pumfrey
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 573 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2010-04-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781139486590

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Science and Religion by Thomas Dixon,Geoffrey Cantor,Stephen Pumfrey Pdf

The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991). Almost two decades on, Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives revisits this argument and asks how historians can now impose order on the complex and contingent histories of religious engagements with science. Bringing together leading scholars, this volume explores the history and changing meanings of the categories 'science' and 'religion'; the role of publishing and education in forging and spreading ideas; the connection between knowledge, power and intellectual imperialism; and the reasons for the confrontation between evolution and creationism among American Christians and in the Islamic world. A major contribution to the historiography of science and religion, this book makes the most recent scholarship on this much misunderstood debate widely accessible.

Author : Aileen Fyfe,Bernard Lightman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2007-09-10
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226150024

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Science in the Marketplace by Aileen Fyfe,Bernard Lightman Pdf

The nineteenth century was an age of transformation in science, when scientists were rewarded for their startling new discoveries with increased social status and authority. But it was also a time when ordinary people from across the social spectrum were given the opportunity to participate in science, for education, entertainment, or both. In Victorian Britain science could be encountered in myriad forms and in countless locations: in panoramic shows, exhibitions, and galleries; in city museums and country houses; in popular lectures; and even in domestic conversations that revolved around the latest books and periodicals. Science in the Marketplace reveals this other side of Victorian scientific life by placing the sciences in the wider cultural marketplace, ultimately showing that the creation of new sites and audiences was just as crucial to the growing public interest in science as were the scientists themselves. By focusing attention on the scientific audience, as opposed to the scientific community or self-styled popularizers, Science in the Marketplace ably links larger societal changes—in literacy, in industrial technologies, and in leisure—to the evolution of “popular science.”

Author : Anonim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2017-06-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004336612

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Neo-Victorian Humour by Anonim Pdf

Highlighting neo-Victorian humour’s crucial role in shaping contemporary re-visions of nineteenth-century culture, this volume explores the major aesthetic, ideological and ethical issues raised by refracting the past through a comic lens, especially through self-conscious irony, parody, and black humour.

Author : Christine Garwood
Publisher : Pan Macmillan
Page : 468 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2010-12-17
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780330540070

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Flat Earth by Christine Garwood Pdf

Contrary to popular belief, fostered in countless school classrooms the world over, Christopher Columbus did not discover that the world was round. The idea of the world as a sphere had been widely accepted in scientific, philosophical and even religious circles from as early as the fourth century bc. Bizarrely, it was not until the supposedly more rational nineteenth century that the notion that the world might actually be flat really took hold. Even more bizarrely, it persists to this day. Based on a range of original sources, Garwood's history of flat-earth beliefs - from the Babylonians to the present day - raises issues central to the history and philosophy of science, its relationship with religion and the making of human knowledge about the natural world. Flat Earth is the first definitive study of one of history's most notorious and persistent ideas, and evokes all the intellectual, philosophical and spiritual turmoil of the modern age. 'Highly entertaining and often hilarious ... an enjoyable romp through the dottier history of scientific and religious eccentricity' Sunday Times 'This entertaining history of the Flat Earth movement is full of crazy characters and fascinating details' Daily Telegraph 'Wonderful ... an intriguing chronicle of 150 years of self- delusion' Financial Times