Introduction: Experiment and the Art of Writing

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Philipp Erchinger
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
Experimental Knowledge ◽  
Introduction Experiment ◽  
Relevant Work

The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.

Literature and science

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Amigoni
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Thomas Dixon ◽  
British Science ◽  
Popular Magazine ◽  
History Of

In this chapter David Amigoni focuses on Arnold Bennett’s essay entitled 'The Rising Storm of Life' written for the popular magazine T.P's Weekly in 1907. While there has emerged a canon of Victorian literature and science writers, shaped substantially by the work of Gillian Beer and George Levine and their focus on Darwin, a focus on Bennett's essay permits a concentration on the retrospective and prospective moods that structured the self-conscious end of century transition. Bennett's essay enables a reconsideration of science's contribution to the experience of modernity through technological development and the harnessing of energy sciences (the work of Crosbie Smith on 'North British' science is also considered). The relative impacts of evolutionary thinkers is also explored, and Bennett's sense of the importance of Herbert Spencer's evolutionism provides an opportunity to discuss some of the revisionist work that has appeared on Spencer (from Thomas Dixon and Chris Renwick), to balance against the dominance of Darwin. Finally, Bennett's use of the popular essay/popular magazine format provides an opportunity to review developments in the 'history of the book', and contributions to Victorian literature and science studies, from the work of James Secord to the work of Gowan Dawson

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tilman Rodenhäuser
Keyword(s):  
Legal Framework ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
International Legal Personality

The general introduction sets the scene for the legal issues addressed in this book by presenting their relevance in most recent conflicts and other situations of violence, including in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, the Central African Republic, and Kenya. It also introduces the legal framework the book sets out to examine, notably international humanitarian law, human rights law, and international criminal law. The introductory chapter further presents the book’s methodology, introduces its structure, and explains key terms and concepts. These include, in particular, the terms ‘non-state armed group’, ‘international legal personality’, and ‘degree of organization’, which are especially relevant throughout the book.

Beyond Two Cultures

2015 ◽  
pp. 400-415
Author(s):  
Alice Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Traffic Models ◽  
The One ◽  
Century Literature

As some of the key arguments of literature and science studies have become widely accepted and adopted by Victorian studies at large, it is necessary to reconsider a number of methodological issues underpinning the historicist study of literature and science in this period. This essay discusses some of the methodological challenges which face the field in a changing research landscape. The essay asks what, if anything, distinguishes nineteenth-century literature and science studies from other existing and potential interdisciplinary historicist approaches. It outlines and critiques some of the key models used in this field, especially the ‘one culture’ and ‘two-way traffic’ models, and explores two fundamental problems in the explanatory procedures of literature and science studies: problems of analogy and causation.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-52
Author(s):  
Tomoe Kumojima
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
East West

The introductory chapter provides the historical and cultural contexts to situate the discussions on Victorian women’s travel writing on Meiji Japan in the wider academic debate on the British Empire, Victorian literature, and female travel writing. It provides an overview of Anglo–Japanese relations between 1854 and 1912 to trace shifts in the bilateral relationship and foreground its singularity in a multitude of East–West encounters. It then examines travel writings by both male and female travellers to Meiji Japan and fictional representations of the country in Victorian literature and theatre. It surveys travelogues by a group of female travellers alongside those by diplomats and journalists like Kipling, Japan-related writings by Wilde and Stevenson, and theatrical pieces such as The Mikado. The chapter considers the literary invention of Japan and analyses how women travellers negotiated discursive constraints due to gender and colonialism and challenged mainstream representations of Japan and Japanese people.

A General Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Michael B. A. Oldstone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Bird Flu ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hiv Aids

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how viruses have caused geographic, economic, and religious changes. Smallpox alone, in the twentieth century, killed an estimated 300 million individuals, about threefold as many persons as all the wars of that century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, smallpox killed emperors of Japan and Burma as well as kings and queens of Europe, thereby unseating dynasties, altering control of countries, and disrupting alliances. In addition to propelling the establishment of Christianity in Mexico and Latin America, viruses played a role in enlarging the African slave trade throughout the Americas. In contrast to viruses such as smallpox and measles which are now harnessed by the innovations of healthcare, new viral plagues of fearful proportions have appeared. These include HIV/AIDS, sudden acute respiratory syndrome, Ebola, Zika, and bird flu. This book looks at the history of viruses and virology, which is also the history of the men and women who have worked to combat these diseases.

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