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

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.

Complexity of the Self-сonsciousness of Science

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-114
Author(s):  
Aleksandr P. Alekseev ◽  
◽  
Irina Yu. Alekseeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Sociology Of Science ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Science Management ◽  
History Of ◽  
Creativity Economy ◽  
Internal And External Factors

The widespread use of bibliometric indicators in science management, associ­ated with the ideology of pseudo-economic positivism, is not only a specific tool for evaluating the work of scientists, but also a serious challenge to the self-con­sciousness of the scientific community. After a while this simplified language becomes the usual language of a scientist’s “self-observation”. At the same time, the expansion of this language meets with increasing resistance that is mani­fested not only in publications of individuals but also in declarations of authori­tative organizations. Science should find a way to give appropriate response to the challenges of the “audit society”. Philosophy of complexity considers the self-consciousness of science as a complex organism, as a system containing a lot of subsystems, that develops under influence of many internal and external factors, is necessary for this purpose. It implies the development of “science of science” (SciSci) as a complex discipline within there would be a real interac­tion between the philosophy of science, history of science, sociology of science, scientometrics, psychology of scientific creativity, economy of science, studies in policy in science an legal regulation and legal aspects of scientific activity.

Walter Pater: Personality and Persons

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-250
Author(s):  
Stephen Cheeke
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reception ◽  
The Self ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
History Of ◽  
Knowledge Of Persons

This article argues for the centrality of notions of personality and persons in the work of Walter Pater and asks how this fits in with his critical reception. Pater's writing is grounded in ideas of personality and persons, of personification, of personal gods and personalised history, of contending voices, and of the possibility of an interior conversation with the logos. Artworks move us as personalities do in life; the principle epistemological analogy is with the knowledge of persons – indeed, ideas are only grasped through the form they take in the individuals in whom they are manifested. The conscience is outwardly embodied in other persons, but also experienced as a conversation with a person inhabiting the most intimate and sovereign dimension of the self. Even when personality is conceived as the walls of a prison-house, it remains a powerful force, able to modify others. This article explores the ways in which these questions are ultimately connected to the paradoxes of Pater's own person and personality, and to the matter of his ‘style’.

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.

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