Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
412,646
result(s) for
"Literature and science."
Sort by:
Ground-work : English Renaissance literature and soil science
How does soil, as an ecological element, shape culture? With the sixteenth-century shift in England from an agrarian economy to a trade economy, what changes do we see in representations of soil as reflected in the language and stories during that time? This collection brings focused scholarly attention to conceptions of soil in the early modern period, both as a symbol and as a feature of the physical world, aiming to correct faulty assumptions that cloud our understanding of early modern ecological thought: that natural resources were then poorly understood and recklessly managed, and that cultural practices developed in an adversarial relationship with natural processes. Moreover, these essays elucidate the links between humans and the lands they inhabit, both then and now.
eBook
Nervous Fictions
\"The brain contains ten thousand cells,\" wrote the poet Matthew
Prior in 1718, \"in each some active fancy dwells.\" In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as scientists began to
better understand the workings of the nerves, the nervous system
became the site for a series of elaborate fantasies. The pineal
gland is transformed into a throne for the sovereign soul. Animal
spirits march the nerves like parading soldiers. An internal
archivist searches through cerebral impressions to locate certain
memories. An anatomist discovers that the brain of a fashionable
man is stuffed full of beautiful clothes and billet-doux. A
hypochondriac worries that his own brain will be disassembled like
a watch. A sentimentalist sees the entire world as a giant nervous
system comprising sympathetic spectators.
Nervous Fictions is the first account of the
Enlightenment origins of neuroscience and the \"active fancies\" it
generated. By surveying the work of scientists (Willis, Newton,
Cheyne), philosophers (Descartes, Cavendish, Locke), satirists
(Swift, Pope), and novelists (Haywood, Fielding, Sterne), Keiser
shows how attempts to understand the brain's relationship to the
mind produced in turn new literary forms. Early brain anatomists
turned to tropes to explicate psyche and cerebrum, just as poets
and novelists found themselves exploring new kinds of mental and
physical interiority. In this respect, literary language became a
tool to aid scientific investigation, while science spurred
literary invention.
eBook
Experimental life : vitalism in Romantic science and literature
Experimental Life establishes the multiple ways in which Romantic authors appropriated the notion of experimentation from the natural sciences.
Winner of the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, BSLS Book Prize of the British Society for Literature and Science
If the objective of the Romantic movement was nothing less than to redefine the meaning of life itself, what role did experiments play in this movement? While earlier scholarship has established both the importance of science generally and vitalism specifically, with regard to Romanticism no study has investigated what it meant for artists to experiment and how those experiments related to their interest in the concept of life.
Experimental Life draws on approaches and ideas from contemporary science studies, proposing the concept of experimental vitalism to show both how Romantic authors appropriated the concept of experimentation from the sciences and the impact of their appropriation on post-Romantic concepts of literature and art.
Robert Mitchell navigates complex conceptual arenas such as network theory, gift exchange, paranoia, and biomedia and introduces new concepts, such as cryptogamia, chylopoietic discourse, trance-plantation, and the poetics of suspension. As a result, Experimental Life is a wide-ranging summation and extension of the current state of literary studies, the history of science, cultural critique, and theory.
eBook
Biological Time, Historical Time
Biological Time, Historical Time presents a new approach to 19th century thought and literature: by focussing on the subject of time, it offers a new perspective on the exchanges between French and German literary texts on the one hand and scientific disciplines on the other. Hence, the rivalling influences of the historical sciences and of the life sciences on literary texts are explored, texts from various scientific domains - medicine, natural history, biology, history, and multiple forms of vulgarisation - are investigated. Literary texts are analysed in their participation in and transformation of the scientific imagination. Special attention is accorded to the temporal dimension: this allows for an innovative account of key concepts of 19th century culture.
eBook
The Cambridge companion to literature and science
\"In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented the presence of 'two cultures': the unbridgeable chasm of understanding, and knowledge between modern literature and modern science. Over the past twenty years, scholars in literature and science studies have worked diligently to interrogate relations between twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and science as radically alienated from each other. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science offers a roadmap to developments which have contributed to the emergence of reciprocal connections between the two areas of study. Weaving together theory and empiricism, individual chapters explore major figures - Shakespeare, Bacon, Darwin, Henry James, William James, Einstein; major genres - fiction, science fiction, poetry, dramatic works, science studies; and major theories and movements - pragmatism, critical theory, cognitive science, ecocriticism, cultural studies, affect theory, digital humanities, and empiricism. This book will be a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Profound Science and Elegant Literature
In 1847, at the first meeting of the American Medical Association, the newly elected president reminded his brethren that the profession, \"once venerated,\" no longer earned homage \"spontaneously and universally.\" The medical marketplace was crowded and competitive; state laws regulating medical practice had been repealed; and professional practitioners were often branded by their lay competitors as aristocrats bent on establishing a health care monopoly. By 1900, the battles were over, and, as the president of AMA had hoped, doctors were now widely venerated as men of profound science, elegant literature, polite accomplishments, and virtue. In fact, by 1900 the doctor had replaced the minister as the most esteemed professional in the United States; disease loomed larger than damnation; and science promised to manage the discord, differences, and excesses that democracy seemed to license. InProfound Science and Elegant Literature, Stephanie Browner charts this trajectory-and demonstrates at the same time that medicine's claims to somatic expertise and managerial talent did not go uncontested. Even as elite physicians founded institutions that made professional medicine's authority visible and legitimate, many others worried about the violence that might attend medicine's drive to mastery and science's equation of rational disinterest with white, educated masculinity. Reading fiction by a wide range of authors beside and against medical texts, Browner looks to the ways in which writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, James, Chesnutt, and Jewett inventoried the collateral damage that might be done as science installed its peculiar understanding of the body. A work of impressive interdisciplinary reach,Profound Science and Elegant Literaturedocuments both the extraordinary rise of professional medicine in the United States and the aesthetic imperative to make the body meaningful that led many American writers to resist the medicalized body.
eBook