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Sto caricando le informazioni... ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Sciencedi Barri J. Gold
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. There's a whole subgenre of Victorianist literary criticism that is "[science x] and literature": so you get books on evolution and literature, geology and literature, astronomy and literature, and in this case, thermodynamics and literature. Barri Gold's work is pleasingly interdisciplinary, looking at literature in the context of science and science in the context of literature, and I appreciate her warning in the introduction to not over-Darwinize. There are other nineteenth-century scientists, and other nineteenth-century sciences! I guess whether or not you like this book comes down to what extent you find this approach a rewarding one. Anne DeWitt warns against it in Moral Authority, and I kind of agree with her: other people can do it, but I'm not terribly interested in reading literature in search of details that I can argue were cribbed from science. Like are Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray "really" about entropy? I dunno. The Time Machine is, which Gold discusses, but in that novel, it's text, not subtext. This review feels dismissive, which it shouldn't be, but that's inevitable. As my scant two pages of notes on it show, ThermoPoetics is an excellent example of a kind of scholarship I am not personally very interested in. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
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. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)820.9Literature English English literature in more than one form History, description, critical appraisal of works in more than one formClassificazione LCVotoMedia: Nessun voto.Sei tu?Diventa un autore di LibraryThing. |