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Science always raises more questions than it can contain. These acclaimed and challenging essays explore how ideas are transformed as they come under the stress of unforeseen readers. Using a wealth of material from diverse nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, Gillian Beer tracks encounters between science, literature, and other forms of emotional experience. Her analysis discloses issues of chance, gender, nation, and desire. A substantial group of essays centres on Darwin and the incentives of his thinking from language theory to his encounters with Fuegians. Other essays include Hardy, Helmholtz, Hopkins, Clerk Maxwell, and Woolf. The collection throws a different light on Victorian experience and the rise of modernism, and engages with current controversies about the place of science in culture.
No detailed description available for "The Third Culture: Literature and Science".
This book for the first time brings together Gillian Beer's essays on Virginia Woolf. Widely recognised as a leading authority on Woolf and a sophisticated critic of modernism and fiction, Beer's essays make fascinating reading. Beer demonstrates, through close investigative textual readings, how Woolf's conceptualisations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing and social and sexual relations.
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This is the first in a planned series of volumes on science and literature, which grow from three basic assumptions explicit in this first volume: first, that science and literaure are two alternative but related expressions of a culture's values and beliefs; and second, that understanding science in its relation to culture and literature requires some understanding not only of its own internal processes, but of pressures exercised by social, political, and psychological forces; third, that the idea of "influence" of one upon the other must work both ways. It is not only science that influences literature, but literature that influences science the authors say. ISBN 0-299-11300-0: $45.00; ISBN 0-299-11304-3 (pbk.): $12.95.
Hilary Fraser provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of English prose in the nineteenth century which draws from a wide variety of fields including art, literary theory and criticisim, biography, letters, journals, sermons, and travel reportage. Through these works the cultural, social, literary and political life of the twentieth century - a period of great intellectual activity - can be charted, discussed and assessed. For the first time, an inclusive critical survey of nineteenth-century non-fiction is presented, that traces the century's ideological and cultural upheavals as they are registered in the literary textures of some of its most widely read and influential writings.The bo...
Still Modernism offers a critique of the modernist imperative to embrace motion, speed, and mobility. In the context of the rise of kinetic technologies and the invention of motion pictures, it claims that stillness is nonetheless an essential tactic of modernist innovation. More specifically, the book looks at the ways in which photographic stillness emerges as a counterpoint to motion and to film, asserting its own clear visibility against the blur of kinesis. Photographic stillness becomes a means to resist the ephemerality of motion and to get at and articulate something real or essential by way of its fixed limits. Combining art history, film studies and literary studies, Louise Hornby ...
Although Gothic writing is now seen as significant for an understanding of modernity, it is still largely characterized as a literature of fear and anxiety. Gothic and the Comic Turn argues that, partly through its desire to be taken seriously, Gothic criticism has neglected the comic doppelganger that has always inhabited the Gothic mode and which in certain texts emerges as dominant. Tracing an historical trajectory from the late Romantic period through to the present day, this book examines how varieties of comic parody and appropriation have interrogated the complexities of modern subjectivity.