Thermopoetics

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ThermoPoetics

Author : Barri J. Gold
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2012-02-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780262288279

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ThermoPoetics by Barri J. Gold Pdf

An engaging exploration of the mutually productive interaction of literature and energy science in the Victorian era, as seen in Tennyson, Dickens, Stoker, and others. In ThermoPoetics, Barri Gold sets out to show us how analogous, intertwined, and mutually productive poetry and physics may be. Charting the simultaneous emergence of the laws of thermodynamics in literature and in physics that began in the 1830s, Gold finds that not only can science influence literature, but literature can influence science, especially in the early stages of intellectual development. Nineteenth-century physics was often conducted in words. And, Gold claims, a poet could be a genius in thermodynamics and a novelist could be a damn good engineer. Gold's lively readings of works by Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Herbert Spencer, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and others offer a decidedly literary introduction to such elements of thermodynamic thought as conservation and dissipation, the linguistic tension between force and energy, the quest for a grand unified theory, strategies for coping within an inexorably entropic universe, and the demonic potential of the thermodynamically savvy individual. Gold shows us that in A Tale of Two Cities, for example, Dickens produces order in spite of the universal drive to entropy; Wilde's Dorian Gray and Stoker's Dracula, on the other hand, reveal the creative potential of chaos. Victorian literature embraced the language and ideas of energy physics to address the era's concerns about religion, evolution, race, class, empire, gender, and sexuality. Gold argues that these concerns, in turn, shaped the hopes and fears expressed about the new physics.

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

Author : Emily Alder
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2020-01-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030326524

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Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle by Emily Alder Pdf

This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird.

Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable

Author : Sarah C Alexander
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781317316800

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Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable by Sarah C Alexander Pdf

The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizeable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or ‘imponderable’.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

Author : Robert L. Patten,John O. Jordan,Catherine Waters
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 848 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780191061127

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The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens by Robert L. Patten,John O. Jordan,Catherine Waters Pdf

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Vibratory Modernism

Author : A. Enns,S. Trower
Publisher : Springer
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2013-07-19
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781137027252

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Vibratory Modernism by A. Enns,S. Trower Pdf

Vibratory Modernism is a collection of original essays that show how vibrations provide a means of bridging science and art - two fields that became increasingly separate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination

Author : Allen MacDuffie
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2014-05-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107064379

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Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination by Allen MacDuffie Pdf

This book explores how Victorian fiction helped create an environmental consciousness by articulating questions about sustainable energy use.

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Author : Barri J. Gold
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2021-04-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030686048

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Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Barri J. Gold Pdf

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite books—Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worlds—and the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.

Working Verse in Victorian Scotland

Author : Kirstie Blair
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2019-06-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192581952

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Working Verse in Victorian Scotland by Kirstie Blair Pdf

This volume reassesses working-class poetry and poetics in Victorian Britain, using Scotland as a focus and with particular attention to the role of the popular press in fostering and disseminating working-class verse cultures. It studies a very wide variety of writers who are unknown to scholarship, and assesses the political, social, and cultural work which their poetry performed. During the Victorian period, Scotland underwent unprecedented changes in terms of industrialization, the rise of the city, migration, and emigration. This study shows how poets who defined themselves as part of a specifically Scottish tradition responded to these changes. It substantially revises our understanding of Scottish literature in this period, while contributing to wider investigations of the role of popular verse in national and international cultures.

Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

Author : Stella Pratt-Smith
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317007814

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Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science by Stella Pratt-Smith Pdf

Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley’s Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity’s potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.

Victorian Science and Imagery

Author : Nancy Rose Marshall
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2021-07-27
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780822987994

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Victorian Science and Imagery by Nancy Rose Marshall Pdf

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences

Author : Gregory Tate
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2020-06-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030314415

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Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences by Gregory Tate Pdf

Poetical Matter examines the two-way exchange of language and methods between nineteenth-century poetry and the physical sciences. The book argues that poets such as William Wordsworth, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy identified poetry as an experimental investigation of nature’s materiality. It also explores how science writers such as Humphry Davy, Mary Somerville, and John Tyndall used poetry to formulate their theories, to bestow cultural legitimacy on the emerging disciplines of chemistry and physics, and to communicate technical knowledge to non-specialist audiences. The book’s chapters show how poets and science writers relied on a set of shared terms (“form,” “experiment,” “rhythm,” “sound,” “measure”) and how the meaning of those terms was debated and reimagined in a range of different texts. “A stimulating analysis of nineteenth-century poetry and physics. In this groundbreaking study, Tate turns to sound to tease out fascinating continuities across scientific inquiry and verse. Reflecting that ‘the processes of the universe’ were themselves ‘rhythmic,’ he shows that a wide range of poets and scientists were thinking through undulatory motion as a space where the material and the immaterial met. ‘The motion of waves,’ Tate demonstrates, was ‘the exemplary form in the physical sciences.’ Sound waves, light, energy, and poetic meter were each characterized by a ‘process of undulation,’ that could be understood as both a physical and a formal property. Drawing on work in new materialism and new formalism, Tate illuminates a nineteenth-century preoccupation with dynamic patterning that characterizes the undulatory as (in John Herschel’s words) not ‘things, but forms.’” —Anna Henchman, Associate Professor of English at Boston University, USA “This impressive study consolidates and considerably advances the field of physics and poetry studies. Moving easily and authoritatively between canonical and scientist poets, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences draws scientific thought and poetic form into telling relation, disclosing how they were understood variously across the nineteenth century as both comparable and competing ways of knowing the physical world. Clearly written and beautifully structured, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences is both scholarly and accessible, a fascinating and indispensable contribution to its field.” —Daniel Brown, Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK “Essential reading for Victorianists. Tate’s study of nineteenth-century poetry and science reconfi gures debate by insisting on the equivalence of accounts of empirical fact and speculative theory rather than their antagonism. The undulatory rhythms of the universe and of poetry, the language of science and of verse, come into new relations. Tate brilliantly re-reads Coleridge, Tennyson, Mathilde Blind and Hardy through their explorations of matter and ontological reality. He also addresses contemporary theory from Latour to Jane Bennett.” — Isobel Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck, University of London, UK

The Starry Sky Within

Author : Anna Henchman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2014-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199686964

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The Starry Sky Within by Anna Henchman Pdf

The Starry Sky Within is an innovative study of previously unexplored connections between nineteenth-century astronomy and British literature. Nineteenth-century astronomers revealed a staggeringly mobile world extending far beyond the scope of human vision and Henchman examines how this discovery inspired the novelists of the day.

The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science

Author : John Holmes,Sharon Ruston
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2017-05-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317042341

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The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science by John Holmes,Sharon Ruston Pdf

Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.

The Poetry of Victorian Scientists

Author : Daniel Brown
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2013-01-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781139619967

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The Poetry of Victorian Scientists by Daniel Brown Pdf

A surprising number of Victorian scientists wrote poetry. Many came to science as children through such games as the spinning-top, soap-bubbles and mathematical puzzles, and this playfulness carried through to both their professional work and writing of lyrical and satirical verse. This is the first study of an oddly neglected body of work that offers a unique record of the nature and cultures of Victorian science. Such figures as the physicist James Clerk Maxwell toy with ideas of nonsense, as through their poetry they strive to delineate the boundaries of the new professional science and discover the nature of scientific creativity. Also considering Edward Lear, Daniel Brown finds the Victorian renaissances in research science and nonsense literature to be curiously interrelated. Whereas science and literature studies have mostly focused upon canonical literary figures, this original and important book conversely explores the uses literature was put to by eminent Victorian scientists.

They Stared at the Sun

Author : David Spooner
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 122 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2014-03-19
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781493142200

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They Stared at the Sun by David Spooner Pdf

This book reads the theory of evolution through the roots of words and the codes set up by relations between roots and key-words. Language was historically created in the course of the work dynamic. Today language has a double function. It not only supplies us with our everyday vocabulary and grammar. It also conceals a language within a language, offering clues as to what it means to be human. This book suggests that the evidence of this language within language shows that not only are we related to the great apes biologically as Darwin established, but that culturally we are related to the insects, and specifically to the metamorphic insects. It is this connection that is crucial And defining. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the Theory of Evolution, sensed some spiritual and artistic range to human experience not explained by Darwin`s central theory. They Stared at the Sun shows how the structures in major artistic works fuse with the development of creatures that undergo radical metamorphosis. They also determine the unique place of humans in the quantum cosmos.