Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920 PDF Download

Author: Martin Willis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317321855
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

View

Book Description
This book explores the Victorian concept of vision across scientific and cultural forms. Willis charts the characterization of vision through four organizing principles – small, large, past and future – to arrive at a Victorian conception of what vision was. Willis then explores how this Victorian vision influenced twentieth-century ways of seeing.

Author: John Holmes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317042336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 645

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Roger Smith
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981718
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
From the late nineteenth century onwards religion gave way to science as the dominant force in society. This led to a questioning of the principle of free will—if the workings of the human mind could be reduced to purely physiological explanations, then what place was there for human agency and self-improvement? Smith takes an in-depth look at the problem of free will through the prism of different disciplines. Physiology, psychology, philosophy, evolutionary theory, ethics, history and sociology all played a part in the debates that took place. His subtly nuanced navigation through these arguments has much to contribute to our understanding of Victorian and Edwardian science and culture, as well as having relevance to current debates on the role of genes in determining behaviour.

Author: Shane McCorristine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000561445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1950

View

Book Description
This edition provides an insight into the dark areas between Victorian science, medicine and religion. The rare reset source material in this collection is organized thematically and spans the period from initial mesmeric experiments at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the decline of the Society for Psychical Research in the 1920s.

Author: Claire L Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317318765
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 277

View

Book Description
By the late nineteenth century, advances in medical knowledge, technology and pharmaceuticals led to the development of a thriving commercial industry. The medical trade catalogue became one of the most important means of promoting the latest tools and techniques to practitioners. Drawing on over 400 catalogues produced between 1870 and 1914, Jones presents a study of the changing nature of medical professionalism. She examines the use of the catalogue in connecting the previously separate worlds of medicine and commerce and discusses its importance to the study of print history more widely.

Author: James F Stark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317318676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

View

Book Description
Stark offers a fresh perspective on the history of infectious disease. He examines anthrax in terms of local, national and global significance, and constructs a narrative that spans public, professional and geographic domains.

Author: Sarah C Alexander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317316819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

View

Book Description
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’.

Author: Martin Willis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137474416
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

View

Book Description
This Guide introduces literature and science as a vibrant field of critical study that is increasingly influencing both university curricula and future areas of investigation. Martin Willis explores the development of the genre and its surrounding criticism from the early modern period to the present day, focusing on key texts, topics and debates.

Author: Kevin Donnelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317316754
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

View

Book Description
Adolphe Quetelet was an influential scientist whose controversial work was condemned by John Stuart Mill and Charles Dickens. He was in contact with many Victorian elite, including Babbage, Herschel and Faraday. This is the first scholarly biography of Quetelet, exploring his contribution to quantitative reasoning and place in intellectual history.

Author: Jonathan Potter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319897373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

View

Book Description
This book offers an innovative reassessment of the way Victorians thought and wrote about visual experience. It argues that new visual technologies gave expression to new ways of seeing, using these to uncover the visual discourses that facilitated, informed and shaped the way people conceptualised and articulated visual experience. In doing so, the book reconsiders literary and non-fiction works by well-known authors including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, G.H. Lewes, Max Nordau, Herbert Spencer, and Joseph Conrad, as well as shedding light on less-known works drawn from the periodical press. By revealing the discourses that formed around visual technologies, the book challenges and builds upon existing scholarship to provide a powerful new model by which to understand how the Victorians experienced, conceptualised, and wrote about vision.